L 2727 
B65 
900 
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BL 2727 




A Scathing and Fearless Expose 01 tiis Lj/e and Real Character. 

t^TheNEWEST, RICHEST. RAREST and R?ICIEST 
BOOK of the Century. Written by Prof. Clark Braden, the 
hero of one hundred debates. 



Contents: I. The Preface, by James \y. Zaohary, Publisher. II. 
Introduction, by Evangelist, George F. Hall. III. Influence and re- 
sult of the work of Ingersoll. IV. His like and real character, 

V. HIS STANDING AS A SCHOLAR, WRITER AND SPE a.KER. VI. INOIBSOIX'S 

Cowardice. VII. A Challenge to an Investigation. Vlli. m pple- 
sient: Atheism and Other Infidelity, by James W. Xachary. 
IV. Seventy one Specific Charges against Ingersoll. 

This pamphlet is a bomb-shell in the camps of Infidelity. It is 
strictly non-seetarian and hence meets a demand in all churches of 
Christendom. It demolishes Infidelity. The facts are startling, the ar- 
guments invincible. It should be read by every preacher, school teacher, 
lawyer, doctor, church-member, or inlldel, in fact every person of every 
ereed and profession. Hundreds of agents everywhere should order and 
sell these pamphlets. Read the book and tell your friends about it. 



Trice : Siugle copy 25 cents : Si:, c ->p'< is SI. 00 ; One dozen copies $1.50; 
V}Q conies $i0.00 prepaid", ^ixtv days credit to reliable persons. 
Rddress: QUARTERLY £HRISTI211V, 
33 North Upperbt. LEXINGTON, KY. 



OLD KENTUCKY WHISKY. 



ZACHARYS TEMPERANCE SPEECHES. 




Ten Cents a Copy ; Seventy.five Cents per Dozen Copies. 



CRRATTA. 



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"has ever 1 •*-**n 
"Snpeistitions." 

''OttO K<>i itehsky " 
"joaks ' 

4 'only to spout " 
ventilated " 

• caused." 

"vicious who" 
"clerical owIf." 
"Storrs, Chalni^rs and < n 
'am-d' instead of 'offer ' 

"with the young" 
•betrayed." 

"masses, especially tie- ^ 

retnted" for repulaed 

"uneo tfuid saints, 
"mawkish sentimentality.' 

"teeme frith attack! 

"where" for when. 

"though he deaoendi to'* 
"his backers. I' 

"sacra" !oi 'soon.' 

•professed" for "profound 
"enemy ' for envy." 
"drove" for "die* 

"drove" f<>r "drew." 
l4 JndgQ W. A. Lemma 

"N . B. Calvert." 

Captain B. C, White 
"2 fcingl B :7-i2." 
**Hen--Hadad " 
"It OOat him no" 
♦♦yellow fever." 
"Newton abandoned 



Ingersoll Unmasked* 



A scathing and fearless expose of his real life* 



; , BY 
CLARK BRADEN, 

^jiuthor of "Problem of Problems" , a weli 
known writer and. clebator, aiid presi- 
dent of Southern Illinois Christian 
College, 

An Introduction by George F. Hall and Supplement 
by James W, £achary. 

Tell the whoh froth and shame the Devil, I will tea% 
vffi" every rev 'fir oj lies. 



FOURTH THOUSAND 



BLUE PRINTfcNG.CO. 

\.y, MN'.T'.N, K y. 



Tr | LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
One Copy Received 

DEC, 



19 1902 

PLASSO-XXc. Nc. 

copy a. 



■\<\00 



PYB{€ BTE3 



DEDICATION, 



Xo the gallant defenders of truth, the friends of 
free speech-, free press and true m religion everywhere 
this book is, respectfully dedicated* 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. 



The life and teachings of Robert G. Engersoll 
are' public not private property. His own choice and 
conduct made it so. He voluntarily assumed the res- 
ponsibility. The principle is true of all men who un- 
dertake to overthrow the loved and honored customs 
of society or to establish a new religion or new philoso- 
phy. The maxim: "Speak nothing but good mneernhig 
the dead" is a beautiful sentiment when applied to that 
class of mankind whose life and teachings entitle them 
to such respect, but when used by maudlin piety to 
shield from just criticism men or women whose influ- 
ence is destined to live through the coming centursie 
and curse humanity wherever their namec are respect- 
ed or their memory held sacred, it becomes a doctrine 
born of Hell. 

Concerning personal enemies or private citizens^ 
however wicked, both the author and publisher of this 
pamphlet would say "Peace to the ashes of the dqnd; fi but 
for good reasons, such as contained in the pages of 
this book, we steadfastly affirm that when the life and 
character of such men as Mahomet, the false prophet, 
Voltaire and Ingersoll the great moguls of Infidelity 
in France and America, and Joseph Smith the founder 
of Mormcnism, can be used to retard their evil influ- 
ence among men, though the dust of centuries may 
have settled upon their tombs or the grass not yet 
green upon their new made graves, no kind of respect 
for the dead should thwart or paralyze the pen of 
truth in its efforts to save the living from the baneful 
effects of a deadly religion, or a damning philosophy 
which find main support in the life, character and 
teaching of their founders. Infidels themselves are 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE, 



forced to this conclusion. For if Christianity is a 
myth, a snare and delusion, then its founder was a. 
fraud and impostor and infidels should lay bare that 
fact to the world. In this conviction the most merci- 
less attacks, ever made upon the living or dead, have 
been made by blatant infidels upon the crucified 
Christ and his martyred apostles whose un replying 
lips could speak not one word from the voiceless dust 
of death. By infidels they were killed and by infidels 
defamed, In this ruthless and lying defamation In- 
gersoll led the van. Then let his influence be, crip- 
pled, his life put to shame and the seal of silence fixed 
upon the mouths of his defenders by a statement of 
the. truth and nothing but the truth about Ingersoll 
and his heinous philosophy. 

The readers of Ingersoll Unmasked should 
bear in mind that Prof. Clark Braden has not waited 
till after the death of Ingersoll to unmask him but 
that the main body of this book is a reprint of "Infi- 
delity Gone To Seed'' which was published years 
before Ingersoll died and that Eider Braden gave him 
ample opportunity to defend himself, challenged the 
most thorough investigation and defied prosecution. 

Ingersoll is dead but his influence and teachings 
survive. Thousands of his books and pamphlets are 
being printed and sold broadcast over the land. Infi- 
dels for centuries will print and sell his works. In 
view of this, it seems right to the publisher of Inger- 
soll Unmasked that Braden's book should have a 
wide circulation as long as the life and teaching of the 
great infidel Ingersoll are held up for emulation before 
the young and aged of the world. 

Some will criticise and blame but, thank God! 
there will be some who will read and praise this effort 
to cripple the influence of Infidelity. 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. 



9 



The reader will find the introduction by the dis- 
tinguished evangelist and author, Geo. F. Hall of 
Chicago, full of interest. 

The Supplement added by the publisher from his 
book ik Moore and Inghrsoll Unmasked" it is be- 
lieved will add force and interest to this work because 
of the argument therein contained and also because of 
the synopsis and proof embraced in Bradeu' s pamphlet 
printed years ago, and widely circulated, bearing the 
.same title as this book. 

Clark Braden. the author, minister, debator and 
professor needs qo word of ^commendation from me. 
He is known loved and honored by thousands of Am- 
erica's test men and women. He holds - the written 
endorsement of many congregations in the Church of 
Christ of which he is an honored member, In the 
battle against Mormonism and Infidelity he has few 
equals and no superiors He and the lamented H. L. 
Hastings of Boston have done more to stem the tide 
of Infidelity in America than any other two living 
men, 

About one hundred thousand copies of Braden s 
books and tracts have been circulated in the United 
States and Canada. He has a standing challenge, 
©o iirring the most merciless investigation, and defies 
prosecution. If it be true that c< by their fruits ye 
shall know them," then the trees of infidelity should 
be destroyed, body, stump, root, and branch. To this 
.agree the words of that great American poet ami 
statesman. James Russell Lowell. At a meeting in 
London, held in honor of the pc^et 'Bruwning. where 
noted infidels were parading their views of human life 
and destiny, when his time came to speak. Mr. Lowell 



10 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE, 



The worst kind of religion is no religion at all; and 
these men who live in ease and luxury, indulging' them- 
selves in the amusement of going without any religion,, 
may be thankful they live in lands where the gospel they 
neglect has tamed the beastliness and ferocity of the men 
who, but for Christianity, might long ago have eaten their 
bodies, like the South Sea Islanders, or cut oft* their heads 
and tanned their hides, like the monsters of the French 
Revolution. When the microscopic search of skepticism 
(which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to 
disprove the existence of a Creator) has turned its attention 
to human society and has four d a place on this planet ten 
miles square where a decent man can live in Recency, com- 
fort, and security, supporting" and educating' his children, 
unspoiled and unpolluted, a. place where age is reverenced, 
infancy and manhood are respected, womanhood honored,, 
and human life held in due regard — when skepticism can 
find one such place on the globe *wdiere the gospel of Christ 
has not gone and cleared the way and made decency and 
security possible, it will then be in order for the skeptical' 
literati to move thither and ventilate their views; but so 
long* as those very men are dependent upon the religion: 
which they discard for the very privileges they enjoy they 
may well hesitate a little before they seek to rob the Chris- 
tian of his hope or humanity of its faith in that Savior who 
alone has given to man the hor>e of life eternal, which 
makes life tolerable and society possible, robs death of its 
terrors and the grave of its gloom. 

It is truthfully said: 

Outside of Bible lands there is not, and there never was, , 
a country on the globe that possessed a railroad, -a tele- 
graph, a post oifiee, a banking system, a free government,, 
or wise public charities. 

Some years ago the Senate of France commissioned 

De Toqueville, an eminent French statesman, to visir 

America and find out the genius of our civilization. 

After studying our institutions, he made this report 

to the legislative body of his nation : 

T went at your bidding: I passed through their thor- 
oughfares of travel: I ascended their mountains and went 
down into their valleys: i visited their manufactories, their- 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE 



commercial markets, and emporiums of trade; I entered 
their judicial courts and legislative halls; but I sought ev- 
erywhere in vain for the secret of their success until 1 en- 
tered their churches and Sunday schools. It was there, a&- 
I listened to the soul-equalizing and soul-elevating prin- 
ciples of the gospel of Christ as they fell from Sunday to 
Sunday upon the masses of the people, that I learned why 
it was that America is great and free and why France was- 
a slave. 

The Bible outlives its foes, and increases the num- 
ber of its friends each day. H. L. Hastings, an emi- 
nent Boston writer, in a pamphlet on " Inspiration of 
the Bible/' states these facts: 

The Bible is a book which has been refuted, demolished, 
overthrown, and exploded more times than any other book 
you ever heard of. Every little while somebody starts up 
and upsets this book, and it is like upsetting' a solid cube 
of granite: it is just as big one way as the other; and when 
you have upset it, it is right side up; and when you over- 
turn it, it is right side up still. Every little while some- 
body blows up the Bible; but when it comes down, it al- 
ways lights on its feet, and runs faster than ever through - 
the world. They overthrew the Bible a century ^ago, in . 
Voltaire's time, entirely demolished the whole thing. "In 
less than a hundred years, 5 ' said Voltaire, " Christianity 
will have been swept from existence, and will have passed - 
into history." Infidelity ran riot through France, • red- 
handed and impious; a century has passed away; Voltaire 
has " passed into history," and not very respectable history, 
either; but his old printing press, it is said, has since been 
used to print the word of God; and the very house where 
he lived is packed with Bibles, a depot for the Geneva Bible 
Society. Thomas Paine demolished the Bible, and finished 
it off finely; but after he had crawled despairingly into a 
drunkard's grave in 1809, the book took such a leap that 
since that time more than tw T enty times as many Bibles 
have been made and scattered through the world as ever 
were made before since the creation of man. Up to the 
year 1800 from four to six million copies of the Script tm s, 
in some thirty different languages, comprised all that had 
been produced since the world began. Eighty years later, 
in 1^80. the statistics of eighty different Bible ^oeien^-, 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE, 



which are now in existence, with their unnumbered agen- I 
cies and auxiliaries, report more than 165,000,000 Bibles, | 
Testaments, and portions of Scripture, with 206 new trans- 
lations, distributed by Bible societies alone since 1804, to j 
say nothing of the unknown millions of Bibles and Testa- j. 
ments which have been issued and circulated by private j 
publishers throughout the world. For a book that fyas 1 
been exploded so many times this book still shows sig*ns of 1 
eonsiderable life. 

The annals of the earth bear witness that in shap- f 
ing the destinies of the race no influence or combifta- 
tion of powers has done so much to elevate and bless 
humanity in time and eternity as has the Bible. Its 
ideas are thoroughly interwoven in government, law, 
history, philosophy, poetry, music, and art. Wher- 
ever its hallowed light has never shone or its benign 
influence been felt there is not only a dismal and dole- 
ful absence of " the true, the beautiful, and the good," 
but, as a rule, there is a prevalence of ignorance, de- 
bauchery, and crime. 

Then let us love the Bible, 

And praise it more and more, 
Our life is like a shadow, 

Our daj s will soon be o ? er; 
But if we closely follow 

The counsel God has given. 
After death we may with angels 

Join to sing his praise in heaven. 

.Lexington, Ky , October, 1900. 



INTRODUCTION. 



BY GEO. F. HALL. 

It is but justice to say that the manuscript for this 
book was prepared some mouths before Mr. Ingersoll's 
death. After that sudden and' unexpected event, I for 
one thought it better to drop the publication of the 
work entirely. I feared the public would accuse the 
jauthor of trying to k 'dance on a dead man's grave/' 
But as time passed and the evil influence of Mr. In- 
gersoll's teachings seemed to widen instead of dim- 
inish, I acquiesced in the desire of my brethren to con- 
tribute what little part I could toward sending forth 
; the powerful antidote to Ingersollia which is contain- 
ed in Bro. Braden's severe arraignment. 

When the arch skeptic, died, many well-meaningv 
but short-sighted Christians predicted that this would 
prove the end of his power to do violence to religion. 
But no sooner had he passed into the Great Beyond 
than his admirers began to sound his praises as never 
before. Had this taffy business been confined to the 
secular press, and to wordly-minded devotees of the 
unreal, perhaps very little harm would have come of 
it. But preachers took it up and vied with each other 
in saying complimentary things about the departed 
Colonel. From Maine to California the pulpits of the 
land resounded with eulogies, and in a number of in- 
stances even religious periodicals contributed to the 
already mountain high accumulation of sickening sen- 
timentality regarding this vaunting agnostic whose 
jjlief claim to notoriety had even been his dashing 
arrogance. Preachers and religious editors are gener- 
ally good fellows, but oftentimes their penetration is 
barely skin deep. If, instead of trembling at the 
over-estimated eloquence, rhetoric, and scholarship of 



14 



INTRODUCTION, 



Xiogersoli all these years, the ministry had challenged 
him in every city, lie would doubtless have been forced 
into a position long ago where he would have exposed 
himself and completel\ r lost vogue. 

So thoroughly had I always believed in this 
theory that I determined to give iu a personal test. 
In January, 1899, when I was preaching at Decatur, 
IH. , where for over six years I served the Tabernacle 
congregation, it was duly announced hi the daily pa- 
pers, and on the bill boards about town, that the dis- 
tinguished Colonel would lecture on the evening of the 
26th, in Power's Grand Opera House, on "Supersti- 
tions." I immediately wrote for Clark Braden, the 
hero of over 100 debates, the life-long foe of all forms 
of irreligion, and perhaps the best-posted man living- 
to-day concerning the tricks and subterfuges of infi- 
delity. I knew that for over thirty years this good 
brother, who has often been abused by brethren for 
whose doctrinal ease and safety he has fought many a 
hard and thankless battle, had been on Ingersoll's 
trail. 

Bro. Braden arrived a week before the Colonel 
was due to appear, and with his invaluable assistance 
as to data, I prepared the following challenge, which 
appeared in The Morning Revieic, Decatur's leading 
daily , on the date of Ingersoll's appearance. At the 
request of the publisher of this book, and because 
many brethren all over the country have expressed a 
desire to possess the challenge in complete form I here 
present it, just ?s clipped from the paper : — 

A CHALLENGE TO INGERSOLL, 

Rev. George F. Hall, pastor of the Tabernacle Christian 
church, has issued the following challenge to infidel Bob 
- Ingersoll : 



INTRODUCTION. 



15 



To Colonel R. G. Ingersoll, 

Dear Sir: You are to address the people of Decatur to- 
night on "Superstition," chief among which it is presumed 
you will assign Christianity. Now as the undersigned is an 
earnest believer in and preacher of this so-called 4l supe.rsti- 
* cion." he begs leave to address you this open letter. 

If Christianity be what you have so long and so arrogant- 
ly asserted it to be, a "superstition/ 5 then you are striving to 
do humanity a great good. But if it be what its Founderand 
supporters claim it to be, a divine system of redemption, then 
you are striving to do humanity an immeasurable injury, 
This is delicate ground and should be walked over carefully. 

Much of your power to do evil or good', as the case may 
be, is given to you by your friends who inflate your reputa- 
tion beyond all reason. For instance, we are told 'that you 
are a graduate of Yale university, and that you are a prodigy 
of learning, erudition, scholarship, scientific knowledge, etc. 

We are told that you stand at the head of your profes- 
sion as a lawyer, having an income therefrom of $70,000 or 
more per annum. 

We are told that in argument you have utterly demol- 
ished William E. Gladstone. Judge Jeremiah Black, Dr. 
Field, George R. Wendling, Father Lambert, and time would 
fail me to enumerate all the poor fellows you have so igno- 
miniously routed in their attempts to defend Christianity 
against your Gibraltar of wisdom, logic and eloquence, 

We are assured by your admirers on every hand that no 
one living man can cope with you successfully in debate- 
that you are simply "cock of the walk/' and stand wit hour 
a rival in the field of religious polemics. 

In order to strip the infidel jackdaw of the stolen plum- 
age with which he has so gorgeously bedecked himself and 
if possible wrest from him thus at least some of his {lower 
for doing evil, I wish to expose his ignorance, cowardice and 
weakness by asking him in this public manner a few qwes- 
ons, awaiting his answer with much interest and pleasure: 



16 



INTRODUCTION. 



1. Is it not true that you have never seen the hour when 
by a fair examination you could have obtained a third grade 
certificate to teach in the common schools of Illinois? Did 
not Jihe Hon. John Warner, then Mayor of Peoria, and one 
of your devoted adherents, in the columns of The Star. Madi- 
son. Ind.. in December 1S85. admit that such was the ease ? 

2. Is it not a notorious truth, well known to the Illinois 
bar, that you are not a well read lawyer ? That you are 
weak and unsafe as counsel, your chief power resting on your 
ability to make splurgy, spread-eagle speeches before a jury ? 
And are not your political harangues and much boomed 
lectures of the same type ? 

3. Is it hot true that your lectures, no matter under how 
many different titles you deliver them, consist merely of the 
ringing of the changes on about a dozen stereotyped assaults 
upon the Bible and Christianity ? And do you not palm off' 
the same old blasphemous " chestnuts' J in each and every 
lecture year after year. 

4. Is it not true that you are one of the most an scrupu- 
lous and unblushing plaigarists on the rostrum to-day? To 
illustrate ■ If you did not really perpetrate the theft your- 
self, did you allow a temperance speech purloined from old 
Dr. Gunn's "Family Physician,'' to be ascribed to you ior 
years without any effort whatever at correction, strutting be- 
fore the reading world with more pompousness than the 
good author would have dared exercise in a century, appro- 
priating all the eclat the brilliant composition in question 
gave you ? 

5. Did not a Philadelphia paper publish, in parellel col- 
umns' a beautiful selection of blank verse written by an 
English poet and quoted by you as original in a speech made 
over the dead body of a child,|thus exposing your plaigarism? 

6. Did not Professor Otito Kolitchsky, of Cape Gireadeaiv 
Mo., in the St. Louis Republic, of Dec. 9, 1884. state that your 
"Mistakes of Moses," as published in the fall of 1876. in the 
Chicago Times, Indianapolis Sentinel, and the Truth Seeker 



INTRODUCTION. 



of New York, was clearly plaigarized from a rare work en- 
titled, "Evidences against Christianity," which wan publish- 
ed in London in 1819 — fifty-seven years befor* — by James 
liittell? 

7. Are not large portions of your "Gods" plagiarized from 
"The Leviathan/' by Hobbes, "The Ruins of Empires," by 
Volnev, Voltaire's "Encyclopedia," and "The System of 
Nature," by DeAlembert ? 

8. Honestly, now. is not every scrap of decent argument 
in your various lectures practically stolen from better minds, 
the bombast, gags, "goalos," chestnuts and vituperative ridi- 
cule alone being original, the characteristic productions of 
the great Ingersoll, the imitator of Dan Rice on the stage of 
religious controversy ? I defy yon to point to one single page 
of solid consecutive thought in any of your tirades against 
Christianity that is not garbled from others! 

9. Fs it not true that in April 1872, Professor Clark Braden 
sent to you a most positive and direct written challenge to 
meet him in debate in the city of Peoria ? Did not the Infi- 
dels of Canton, Illinois, in 1877. challenge the Ministerial as- 
sociation of that city to have Professor Braden meet you in 
debate, and was not the challenge promptly accepted ? Did 
not the infidels of Bushnell and < o>odhope. Ills., in February, 
challenge the ministers of those places to have Professor 
Hraden meet you in debate, and again was not the challenge 
promptly accepted ? And did you not vigorously and uncere- 
moniously back square down and out in each instance ? As 
this was years before Professor Braden published Ins cele- 
brated pamphlet. "Ingersoll Unmasked. >J an expose fur 
which it is understood you have little affection, this publica- 
tion cannot be paraded as an excuse for your evident coward- 
ice. 

10. Did not Rabbi Brown, before a large an intelligent 
audience in Peoria. Illinois, in the most positive and un- 
eqnivosal manner challenge you to a debate ? Did not the 



18 



INTRODUCTION^ 



same distinguished Hebrew clergyman before several gen- 
tlemen in Washington, D. C, tell you to your face that you 
were %> an ignoramus, a charlatan, and a coward, who dare 
not meet in honorable debate a representative Jew or Chris- 
tian ?" 

11. Were you not pointedly challenged to debate with 
Rev. Aaron Walker, a distinguished minister oi the Christian 
church, in Kokomo. End ? And did you not endeavor to 
laugh the matter off by punning on trie name of your worthy 
would-be opponent ? 

12. Did not Colonel A. B. MacGruder one of the ablest 
controversialists of his day. and a leading member of the 
Virginia bar, challenge you for debate, in the papers of Rich- 
mond, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia'.' 

3 3. Did not Dr, Z. T. Sweeney, consul general to Turkey 
under Harrison, and a leading minister of the Christian 
Church of Indiana, challenge you to a debate at Columbus 
Ind ? And were you not also challenged while in England 
by the Rev. James Gregg ? 

14. Did not Mr. John Darst, Rev. J. W. Monser, and four 
other prominent citizens of Eureka, Ills., challenge you to 
meet President 0. A. Burgess, offering to deposit, in bank 
*5.000 and to pay you therefrom the sum oi $500 per night 
for a ten-nights discussion ? 

15. Did not Rev. H. M. Brooks, for seven years pastor of 
the Christian Church at Paris, Ills., before a large audience 
in that city, challenge you to a debate guaranteeing you in 
answer to your objection that you could not afford to spend 
the time, the sum of $500 per night, to be paid you each 
evening before stepping onto the platform ? 

3.6. Did not you violate your agreement with Judge Jere- 
miah Black, in the most contemptible manner, by sending 
to him your argument only eight days before the date of 
publication of the magazine in which the discussion agreed 
upon was to appear, thus giving him but a short time in 



INTRODUCTION 



19 



which to prepare an answer to over fifty pages of printed 
matter that you had spent many weeks in compiling? And 
■'did you not refuse to allow his reply to your article to ap- 
pear in the same number, thus breaking a positive contract? 
# I understand upon what t consider good authority that 
you showed the white feather in each and every one of these 
instances, and in as many more perhaps had I the time or in- 
clination to unearth the facts. If I have been misinformed 
now is your golden opportunity to set not only myself, but a 
long-suffering and evei -patient public right. Unless you 
bring forth proofs to the contrary you can not blame an in- 
credulous host from believing that Rabbi Brown spoke the 
truth when he told you to your teeth that you were an igno- 
ramous, a charlatan, and a coward, daring only to sdonj 
your stolen thunder when there was no danger from a direct 
reply. It seems sad but true that you dare not and will not 
meet in a fair, manly, and thorough public debate and intelli- 
gent, representative defender of the Bible. 

Now sir, in order to strip yon if possible, of the power to 
do evil in your incantations against Christianity which a 
fictitious reputation for bravery, scholarship, and the love of 
truth gives you, a reputation which yourself and your friends 
so indastriously and persistently fabricate, pad and bolster, 
in order to expose your collossal ignorance and monumental 
gall, and to expose your pitiful weakness if you accept, or 
your inexcusable cowardice if you reject, I. the undersigned 
in behalf of the Church Street.Christian Church worshipping 
in the Tabernacle, in Decatur, 111., (membership 700), and 
in behalf of the churches of Christ throughout the United 
States and Canada, hereby challenge you to meet in public 
oral debate, for at least six nights (twelve preferred) one 
that shall be selected and duly endorsed by said churches. 
The undersigned was born and reared among the disciples 
of Christ, and believes emphatically in their ability to suc- 
cessfully defend the religion of Jesus Christ'againfit the as- 



20 



INTRODUCTION. 



saults of every form of skepticism. If this belief is unwar- 
ranted he deserves to have it properly mutilated in the man- 
ner proposed. But until R. Gr. lngersoll. the acknowledged 
champion of infidelity the world over, is able to stand up at 
least once in a fair and square* debate with a man worthy qf 
his metal, he is not willing to surrender "the faith once de- 
livered to the saints. 

The Church of Christ sometimes called Disciples, is the 
third Protestant religious body in the United States, num- 
bering according to the latest obtainable statistics, about 
1,200,000 communicants, 10,000 congregations, and 6,000 
preachers, with fifty periodicals and as many institutions 
of learning. In our ministry we have a number of men who 
are as widely and more favorably known than R. d. lngersoll, 
and from the list it will be easy to select one who will be 
ready within twenty-four hours to meet, the doughty Col- 
onel in debate at such place and such time as may be mut- 
ually agreed upon. 

I admit your proficiency in splutter, splurge, and speen, 
Colonel, and admire your ability to juggle words. You make 
a jolly clown of ridicule, misrepresentation and abuse of 
things sacred and divine for the rabble, and, lamentably for 
many honest doubters, young and old. but 1 do not believe 
you dare accept the challenge I have made yon for fear of 
the exposure that is sure to follow — the exposure of your 
shallow fund of real argument, your knavery in the use of 
decent tactics, and your ugly temper, which when roused by 
prodding is said to be simply uncontrollable. You dare not 
debate ! 

With reference to the selection of an opponent, lest you 
should have some one in mind whom you would delight to 
.slander, from personal reasons, I will just suggest that it is 
not for you to say whom w r e shall select. If you were sued, 
would you allow the plaintiff to dictate to you what lawyer 
you should select? If he should attempt such impudent 



INTRODUCTION 



21 



dictation would you not reason wisely that the lawyer the 
plaintiff tabooed was the lawyer of all others you should em- 
ploy? Therefore if in this rase you should attempt to dic- 
tate who shall or who shall not he selected as your ooponent, 
then I suggest that we leave the matter to a mutually chosen 

• committee of three lawyers to say whether either party has 
any right to dictate to the other in such a passage at arms as 
is here proposed. You are the aggressor. Now come up to 

.the challenge like a man. 

Anticipating your old plea that your time is so valuable 
that you cannot afford to waste it in such a debate. J hereby 
agree to pay you the sum of $500 per night in advance each 
night of the discussion, whether it shall continue six or 
twelve nights. As to my ability to keep this pledge I would 
respectfully refer you to T. DeWitt Talmage, John J, Ingalls, 
Sam P. Jones, and many other distinguished men whom I 
have brought here and introduced from the Tabernacle plat- 
form the past rive years. Suffice it to say that if money is all 
you want, you may expose me to the world as unworthy of 
confidence the first night I fail to keep the above agreement. 

Again, let me implore you not to attempt to laugh this 
matter down or to burlesque it as you have done so often 
before. Nor crawl out in silence. A grin is not an argu- 
ment. Grinning requires bat the exercise of certain mus- 
cles of the face, and although for a man you are an adept at 

■ this act, a monkey can beat you at it any day in the week. 
No, the issue is on. and should be met manfully. Either 
you are -right in denouncing Christianity, or you are wrong. 
If you are right, what have you to fear in a fair and square 
discussion, before a fair and square American audience, with 
a fair and square opponent, whom I will guarantee to be 
worthy of your best elibrt in brains, lungs, and grins, and 
above ail in a reverent and dignified defense of the great 
truths of the religion of Jesus Christ. I wish to make this 
challenge explicit and imperative. Accept it. and you may 
prove yourse If able to wear the laurel wreath of honest 



INTRODUCTION. 



courage. Reject it, ridicule it, laugh it down, rant and swear 
at it, paw the air, and bellow yourself hoarse because of it M 
and you will be branded a coward. Please make your decis- 
ion known to-night at the place of your lecture in the opera 
house. As this challenge will in all probability be given 
very wide publication throughout the United States and 
Canada, it is fondly hoped that you wiil accept it like a man, 
and consent to enter into a fair and honorable comparison 
of what you so arrogantly vaunt as "Free Thought," with 
what you have so long sneered at as "superstition." 

Sincerely, 

Decatur. 111., Jan. 26, 1899. GEO. F. HALL, 

In addition to supplying the regular heavy local 
demand, the Review people issued 2,000 extra copies, 
and through a previous arrangement on the part of 
Bro. Braden and myself marked the columns contain- 
ing the challenge, and mailed them to a selected list 
of both secular and religious journals throughout the 
United States and Canada. The matter was thus 
widely discussed, and Ingersoll's back-down did him 
no good. The challenge was translated into several 
different languages, and in one instance that I heard 
of, incorporated into a short-hand system of instruc- 
tion on account of its vocabulary, and for the moral 
effect it might have on young men students. 

Of course the initiated never for one moment ex- 
pected Ingersoll to accept the challenge. This was 
not his style. In company with several other preach- 
ers I attended the lecture on "Superstition/' and was 
ready for whatever might occur. But he made no 
direct reference to the challenge. At his hotel, how- 
ever, a reporter was present when he received from me 
a marked copy of the paper containing ray challenge 
and he stormed about considerably upon reading it. 
The next day a drummer friend of mine happened to 



INTRODUCTION . 



23 



be on the same train with the Colonel and his wife 
and their secretary, and he was still raging, copy of 
paper in hand. When he reached Indianapolis, the 
reporters besought him at once, and asked him what 
he was going to do about that challenge. His wife 
spoke for him saying that the Colonel had often been 
challenged during his long career, but never by any- 
body whom he considered worthy to meet him. Oh! 
what comfortable conceit! 

The local effect of the challenge was very percep- 
tible. He had been in the habit of visiting our town 
every few years regaling a big nest of skeptics with 
his slimy tirades. On the occasion of his last visit 
the manager of the Opera House said he had a S600- 
house. This time his receipts amounted to but S-4,> 
a falling off of $357 which was generally attributed 
about town to my challenge which seemed to have 
just the effect I sought, viz: To so expose the man as U) 
disgust the public with him — in short, to uM/rrwisk him ! 

If this unpretentious introduction, and the red 
hot pages of Bro. Braden which follow, shall succeed 
in doing this among any who are today worshipping 
the memory of one of the w 7 orst enemies of the church 
in modern times, then I shall be truly gratified for the 
privilege of helping a little in overthrowing the false 
for the true. 

G. F. H. 

O c t o De r , 1 ckx) . 

Chicago, 111... '508 Eddy street. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



BY CLARK BRADEN. 

In 1871, R. G. Ingersoli, a notorious lawyer a^d 
politician, of Peoria, Illinois, delivered, in Fairbury, 
Illinois, on the anniversary of the birth of Thomaa 
Paine, an infidel harangue — his first eulogy of Thomas 
Paine. It attracted some attention. The next anni- 
versary, January 29th, 1872, he delivered, in the same 
place, his lecture entitled "The Gods. 1 ' It was re- 
peated in Peoria, published very widely in the papers 
and great numbers sold in pamphlet form; was widely 
read and attracted great attention, and caused much 
discussion and comment. Since that time Ingersoli 
has traveled and lectured extensively, drawing great 
crowds. He has given to the world what purport to 
be nearly one hundred lectures, which have been wide- 
ly published in the papers and in pamphlet and book 
form. It is claimed that hundreds of thousands of 
copies of each, of certain lectures, have been circulat- 
ed, and, in the aggregate, millions of copies have been 
circulated and read. 

Ingersoli has also published, in magazines, infidel 
articles, and has had controversies with Judge Black, 
Dr. Fields, Gladstone, and others. It is safe to say 
that no living person has addressed a larger number 
of persons ; been read by more persons ; influenced 
more persons ; and been more talked about ; and heard 
more talk, during the last thirty years, than R. G. 
Ingersoli. 

The writer published, in 1881, an expose of In- 
gersoli, entitled "Ingersoli Unmasked." More than 
fifty thousand copies were circulated. Extracts from 
it were published in thousands of papers, and quoted 
in lectures and sermons., until Ingersoli was driven 



26 



INGEESOLL UNMASKED. 



from the field, and out of politics for years. No effort 
has been made for years to circulate the pamphlet and 
Ingersoll, some years before his demise, attempted to 
regain his former prestige in the lecture field, and in 
politics. 

The writer has been urged to publish a new edi- 
tion of the pamphlet, and in doing so, he avails him- 
self of the oppoitunity to revise it. putting into it, in. 
as concise a form as possible, the facts in regard to 
Ingersoll— his career, his character, his education, his 
ability ; so that the glamour of adulation, that has ex- 
aggerated these traits, ma\ r be dispelled , so that all 
can know his real character. In doing this he com- 
plies with the advice of many leading preachers of 
various denominations, who believe it to be a duty 
that he owes to the cause of religion, morality, and 
truth, to deprive Ingersoll of the fictitious reputation 
fabricated for him, that gives to him his greatest power- 
to injure religion; a power that he wields to the ut- 
most against the truth. Telling the truth in regard 
to a person is no injustice to him, and if complaint is 
made, objectors should remember that Ingersoll is 
responsible for the character of the truth told, and no 
one else. 



What Has Been tbe Influence and Result of the 



Work of Ingersoll ? 

There is in every community a class of persons, of 
both sexes, that are impatient under the restraints of 
law, morality and religion. Some are already lawless 
and vicious; and others desire to be so, and feel hamper- 
ed by the restraints of religion and morality. There 
are many such among the young. Indeed there is, in 
almost every youth, a tendency in such direction. Re- 
ligion, the teachings and influence of the church, the 
Sunday School and the pulpit, and of parents, counter- 
act such tendencies, and check and restrain such per- 
sons. They feel and know that religion and its influ- 
ences are the chief restraint. They do not dare to ex- 
press themselves openly, and to rush to the extreme of 
repudiating restraint, and openly opposing the idea 
that vice should be restrained and punished. 

Ingersoll has acted as the mouthpiece of such 
classes, and has given boldness and utterance to their 
evil desires. He has played the part of a hardened 
street gamm, who comes up to a crowd of boys, evil 
and vicious, and are contemplating a crime, but hesi- 
tate to begin it. He perches his brimless hat on one 
side of his head, gives his suspeuderiess rags a hitch, 
rolls his quid to one side of his mouth, squirts out a 
mouthful of tobacco juice, and yells, with an oath: 
"That's nothing, you are a lot of greenies; come on, 
I'll show you how to do it!" The little ruffian is a 
hero to those embryo criminals. He gives boldness and 
expression to their evil desires. So Ingersoll gives 
impudence and vent to irreligion, lawlessness and re- 
bellion against religion, morality and law. He gives 
expression to these evil tendencies, and gives boldness 



DSGERSOLL 1 NM ASKED. 



to persons under their influence, to express themselves 
openly and defiantly, and to act out their evil desires. 
When it i* announced that Ingersoll will give a lecture 
in a place, the drunken, the profane, the lewd, the vic- 
ious, the vile, the criminal, flock to hear him, as buz- 
zards flock to regale themselves on carrion. The loud- 
est and most enthusiastic of his admirers are to be found 
in grogshops, gambling hells, dens of vice, infamy and 
low resorts that reap a harvest while he is in the place, 
and from which the larger portion of his audieuce comes* 
A gentleman going home from his lecture in Youngs- 
town, Ohio, passed several saloons. In each and all 
crowds were roaring over his attacks on religion, and 
yelling for "Bob" "He's our fellow. He's ex- 
ploded all that staff about God and Hell. Pitch in 
and do as you please, and if you keep clear of the opa 
you're all right." It is a notorious fact that the 
fast, the evil disposed, flock to his lectures for miles — 
hundreds of miles by rail; and grogshops, gambling 
hells, bagnio dens of vice, infamy and low resorts reap 
a harvest, and are crowded, and open out their crowds 
into his audiences. 

If a preacher visits a community and all accept his 
teaching, and live as Jesus lived and taught men to live, 
drunkenness, lawlessness, profanity, lewdness, vice and 
crime will cease, and all good will be lived and striven 
for. Let Ingersoll visit the same communit}' and all 
accept his teaching; not one less oath will be sworn: not 
one less act of lewdness, lawlessness, or crime will 
be the result. On the contrary, all hell will be stirred 
by his coming, and be in an uproar, and the fast, the 
profane, the drunken, the lewd, the vicious, the vile, 
the criminal will flock to grogshops and dens of vice, 
infamy and low resorts that will have a perfect carni- 
val, and spew out their vile crowds into his audience, 
like buzzards from their roosts, flocking to regale them- 



INGERSOLL UN M A SKED. 



29 



selves with carrion. Others, that ought to be above 
listening to such vicious harangues, go to his lect- 
ures impelled by the prurient curiosity that leads per- 
sons that ought to be respectable, to flock to see Black 
Crook and lewd spectacular dramas. The crowd roars 
and shouts over I nger soil's falsehoods, ribaldry and 
blasphemy as they would over the profane and ribald 
jests of a circus clown. Xo one would dare to dispute 
that his harangues were of the highest order, and that 
his audiences were of the most refined and intellectual 
character, and that their highest nature was appealed 
to in the most exalted manner; who reads • 'laughter." 
1 'great laughter' ' 'loud laughter' uproarous laughter,' ' 
' t riproarom laughter," in nearly every sentence, secur- 
ing over one hundred times, in the report of one lecture. 
That bis audiences were of the most refined cultured and 
intellecual character; and that their intellects were ap- 
pealed to in the most exalted manner, is evident from 
the fact that they hooted, yelled, stamped, laughed, 
roared and screamed uproariousl}" and riproariously. 
Such efforts are the gospel of reason, science and pro- 
gress, that is to banish the hoots of such clerical ones as 
Hall, Stons, Chalmes and Chopin! 

The next day, in grogshops, bagnios and all places 
of 1ow t and vicious resort, on every street corner; in 
every knot of loafers, in every crowd of the idle and 
vicious, the profane, the lewd, the vicious are engaged 
in rehashing Ingersoll' blasphemies his lying caricature 
and ridicule of everything sacred and good, with ob- 
scenity and blasphemy of their own; and rolling them 
as sweet morsels under their foul tongues, Irrelig- 
ion and vice rear their hideous fronts defiantly, and 
flout religion, morality and restraint, and blaspheme all 
idea of restraint, of vice or punishment of sin and quote 
Ingersoll's utterance to sustain them in their infamy. 

Those wh ^ should not have entertained, for one 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



moment the idea of listening to such harangues, have 
had their moral sense blunted, and a taint imparted to 
their spiritual nature, from which it will never recover. 
No one can stifle conscience and love and respect for 
parents, in listening to ridicule and caricature of them, 
and ever again feel for them the same love and rever- 
ence as before such baseness. And no one can stifle 
conscience and moral sense; and not do violence to re- 
ligious and moral nature, in listening to Ingersoll's ly- 
ing, blasphemous caricatures of everything good and 
sacred; and laugh at them, without being debased, and 
having moral nature and sensibility blunted and im- 
paired. They can never again feel for leligion and 
morality the reverence felt before taking part in such 
ridicule of them. One can not handle pitch without 
being defiled. 

Ingersoll has emboldened thousands to retail and 
imitate his assaults on religion and morality, on every 
occasion that they can seize. He has encouraged 
thousands to utter irreligion and immorality, and to 
assail religion and morality. He has influenced 
thousands to cast aside the restraints of religion and 
morality, and to launch out into irreligion and infidel- 
ity. He has sown doubts in thousands of minds. 
He has influenced, for evil and against religion, hun- 
dreds of thousands. He has exerted a baleful in- 
fluence over millions. His influence has been evil, 
and evil only, and that continually. If a census 
were taken of all who would openly avow them- 
selves followers of Ingersoll, it would startle those 
who offered to belittle his influence. If all were 
enumerated that have been led out into doubt, or con- 
firmed in scepticism by his work, it would startle com- 
placent believers who offer to treat his influence with 
contempt. 

The writer is not an alarmist, but he has traveled 



INGERSOLL UN M A SK ED. 



31 



in the United States and Canada, perhaps as widely, as 
any one, and has come in contact with young, the act- 
ive, the business public; and has had opportunities for 
learning facts that preachers, editors of religious papers 
do not have. When one has traveled fiom the Gulf of 
St Lawrence to the Gulf of California, from Puget 
Sound to the Gulf of Mexico, and has had Ingersoll's 
harangues thrust into his face, by newsbo}'s on every 
train every few hours, has seen them in windows of 
nearly every news stand and book store, and has had 
them thrust into his face by itinerant hawkers on near- 
ly every street corner, he can form some estimate of 
the influence they have exerted. The w r riter does not 
fear a triumph of error unless the truth is destroyed by 
the indifference, or the cowardice of its professed 
friends. But truth must be defended, and error and 
falsehood exposed. We have no patience with the laz- 
iness, indifference, cow r ardice or cant, that neglects or 
refuses to do this work. In too many cases preachers 
act as though they believe, that they do their duty, if 
they maintain a feeble precarious hold over a few in the 
community, that enables them to eke out a scarcely 
tolerable living from them. They rehash the stereotyped 
ideas of their effete systems of theology ; and utter stale 
platitudes called sermons, to a few indifferent hearers, 
who listen as a mechanical routine of supposed duty; 
and the hearers, and especially the young, rarely listen 
to them, and when they do, they do it with doubt or 
disbelief, or indifference, or contempt. A large portion 
of the community never listen to them. Still more on- 
ly semi-occasionally and rarely, and many of their reg- 
ular hearers are more or less skeptical. 

Ministers are ignorant of the skepticism that like 
a dry rot, pervades the minds of the community of their 
hearers, and of the members of their churches. They do 
not seek to learn the truth — are ignorant of it, and seem 



32 



INGER&OLL UNMASKED, 



to desire to avoid hearing it, and try to shut their eyes 
against what is forced on them. Let all ministers earn- 
est 1}' strive to learn true answers to these queries: How 
many of those, who could and should attend church 
never attend? How many rarely attend? How many 
do not attend half of the time? Of those who do attend, 
how many are present at the morning service? How man} 7 
at evening service? How many skeptical persons in the 
community? Not how many openly avowed infidels; 
but how many doubt the Bible, do not believe portions 
of it? The facts they w T ould learn would be wholesome 
in effect, if they did disturb ministerial complacency. It 
is to such people that Ingersoll appeals. It is such a 
condition of affairs that enables him to do so much evil. 
The fact should be learned, and the issue met. If 
Christianity be true it should be defended against this 
rising tide of infidelity. If Ingersollism be false it 
should be met, repulsed, exposed, overthrown and men 
saved from ruin by it. 

"But Ingersoll is not w r or thy of notice." Deme- 
trius of Ephesus w 7 as not w T orthy of notice, but he was 
able to throw the city in an uproar, and drive out the 
apostles. When a man can secure millions of hearers 
and readers, and influence millions against religion and 
morality, he is w T orthy of notice. When infidelity and 
doubt are influencing, to a greater or less extent, the 
majority of the adult males of this generation and in- 
fluence to some extent, many church members, they 
are worthy of notice. They must be noticed, met, re- 
futed; or the church will go dowm. It is amusing or 
rather disgusting to hear a preacher who never address- 
es more than three or four hundred, and that not twdce 
a year; and whose audiences average from fifty* to one 
hundred, declare after, Ingersoll has lectured in his 
community to an audience of 1500 to 2000; "He is 
not worthy of notice." 



LKGERSOLL UNMASKED 



"It Is stooping for Christians to notice Ingersoll. ' * 
If Christians are what they should be, it is stooping for 
them to notice any sin. Christ stooped to save man- 
kind, the sinners, the lowest. If the church and j reach- 
ers are above stooping to save souls from infidelity and 
too good to attack and destroy unbelief, that is leading 
souls to ruin, they are too good for this world, and too 
exalted for the duties of life. 

"Only let him alone and he will lose his influence. 
It will die out if he is let alone. Noticing him only 
gives him notoriety: and increases the evil/ 5 What a 
pity such transcendent infallible wisdom had not been 
known from the beginning of sin on this earth. Inger- 
soll declares 4 'Had I been present at creation I could 
have saved the Almighty from many blunders." Had 
these wiseacies been present they could have suggested, 
when man sinned, that if the Devil and man were let 
alone sin would die out. Noticing it by giving to the 
world plan of salvation-assailing it byYe relation — war- 
ing on it throughout thousands of years, only brought 
sin into notice, and increased the evil The Son of 
God came into the world to assail and destrov the 
works of the devil. What a mistake. Had he let 
them alone they would have died out. Assailing them 
only brought them into notice, and increased the evil. 
What a pity that God, his Son, the Holy Spirit and in- 
spired men, had not been as wise as these wiseacres- 
did not know this infallible recipe for killing off sin 
and the Devil, What a mistake Luther, Calvin. Wes- 
ley, Campbell and all reformers made in assailing error 
and evil. Had they let them alone., they would have 
died out. Their work in assailing error and evil onlv 
gave them notoriety and increased the evil. Why do 
not such wiseacres stop all preaching, and let sin aloue ? 
if assailing sin only gives it notoriety, and increases 
the evil. 



I&GERSOLL UNMASKED. 



The truth is all such talk is the merest drivel, and 
cowardly hypocritical cant. It is the gabble of ignor- 
ance, that can not meet sin— of cowardice that dare not, 
and of indifference or laziness, that shirks duty and uses 
such gabble as a lying excuse. All that any sin wishes 
is to be let alone while doing its work. Why not let 
a fire alone that is burning up a city? It will die out 
if let alone. Yes, when it has destroyed all that is to be 
destroyed. 

Infidelity can not be put down by such cowardly 
hyocritical cant and sanctimoniousness, nor by assumed 
clerical or churchly dignity, nor by lying assertions 
that it is not worthy of notice, or that noticing it re- 
sults in harm by giving it notoriety, and increases the 
evil. Cow r ardice, ingnorance, indifference, laziness lie 
back of ail such hypocritical lying cant, that is gabbled 
as a cloak for betrayal of the truth. 

Infidelity can no more be prayed down, nor put 
down by preaching sermons on other topics than other 
sins can be overthrown in that way. Common sense 
has taught the lesson, and experience has verified it, 
that intemperance, gambling and other evils can be 
put down only by assailing them, denouncing them, 
noticing them, preaching, exposing them. The same is 
equally true of Ingersoll's work. When Israel was de- 
feated before Ai, Joshua prostrated himself in prayer. 
He was told to get up out of the dust, put aw^ay sin, 
and g.o back and conquer Ai like a man; and quit whin- 
ing like a coward. Christians should heed the lesson, 
and fight Iugersoll like men, instead of praying God to 
do what they should do themselves. 

Unless Christianity is false, and infidelity is true, 
it is not true as w r e are often assured, that replying to 
infidelity will spread infidelity and increase the evil. 
Why not stop all preaching against any and all evil and 
sin, on the same plea, that noticing them only gives 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



85 



them notoriety, and increases the evil? Why is not this 
true of all evil as well as of unbelief? What would be 
thought of a lawyer, who would assert "I have the law 
and the evidence on my side, but I will not go into 
court and state them to the court and jury, for if I notice 
the other side, it will give that side notoriety, and 
-cause doubt, and cause me to lose my case. I will let 
the opposing counsel have the field all to himself, and 
let him say what he'pleases, without any attempt at ref- 
utation. I will win my case by letting it go against 
me by default. ' ' Such a lawyer would be sent to an in- 
sane asylum, or a hospital for idiots. Would he' be 
-any more insane or idiotic, than those who raise the 
clamor, that assailing evil, opposing infidelity, replying 
to Ingersoll, only gives him notoriety, and increases 
the evil? Are not they worse than Ingersoll, when 
they make such assertion in regard to the word of God ! 
' 'Well, we are opposed to all debating. It does no good. 
It is not in harmony with the spirit of the religion of 
Christ. It is not dignified. It is not Christian. M I 
w r onder if such persons have sufficient common sense to 
see wdiat an assault such stuff is on God, Christ, the 
Hoi} 7 Spirit, and inspiration — that it is a censure of 
their action, that is really blasphemous. The book of 
Job is a debate, in which the Almighty makes 
the closing speech. The addresses of inspiration to 
man, from Adam to Malachi, were largely discussion, 
debates. The utterances of the Holy Spirit through 
the prophets w 7 ere largely debates, John the Baptist de- 
bated. The last six months of the career of Jesus was 
one constant stormy debate, in which he used the most 
fearful denunciations, that were ever uttered in human 
speech. The apostles debated constantly. Paul debat- 
ed in synagogues, in the lecture room of Tyrannus six 
months, in Ephesus two years. His letters and the let- 
ters of the other apostles are full of debate. Renan as- 



36 



ISGERSQLL UNMASKED. 



sails Christ for debating and urges precisely the cant 
that cowardly preachers and Christians now urge 
against debating. Had these >k unco quid saints" been 
present they would have saved Jehovah, Christ the 
Holy Spirit and inspired men, from the low act of de- 
bating that always results in evil. 

If Christianity be true it must be proclaimed and 
proven to be true. It must be defended. Opposition 
to truth, error and falsehood, evil and sin. must be as- 
sailed, exposed, overthrown. If the church, preachers 
and Christians do not do such work, they are as recre- 
ant to duty as any army that acts the coward, stays 
in camp, and lets the enemy desolate and destroy the 
country it should defend, As the enemy, after they 
had destroyed all support to such an army, would they 
destroy such a cowardly traitorous host: so infidelity, 
when it has taken possession of the world outside of 
the church, will stamp out of existence, such a trait- 
orous cowardly ministry and church recreant to every 
impulse of duty. 

In this pamphlet the author does a work that it is 
an imperative duty of all lovers of truth, all opponents 
or error and evil. He tells the truth in regard to lu- 
gersoll as a man. His admirers have most industrious 
ly fabricated for him. a reputation that he is utterly 
unworthy to enjoy. His critics hitherto have either 
been ignorant of what they ought to know, or they act 
a falsehood, in concealing it; and betray and wound 
the truth. Since this fabricated fictitious reputation 
of being a man of unblemished reputation, a man of 
great t learning and erudition, that they concede to him, 
gives to his attacks on religion and morality, their chief 
force — if they concede this reputation to him through 
ignorance, such ignorance should be removed , and his 
vile character exposed, and be stripped of his powder 
for evil, ignorantly and untruthfully conceded to him. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED 



If his critics know his real character, and concede to 
him what they know he does not possess; they are not 
only guilty of falsehood but they betray the truth, 
and forge weapons for evil, in conceding to him a pow- 
er for evil, that he should not be permitted to wield, 
His gross ignorance, his utter lack of a respectable ed- 
ucation, his shallowness as a scholar, reader and reas- 
oner; his plagiarism should be exposed. So should 
his vile life and character This would deprive him of 
a mighty power for evil, that has been unjustly con- 
ceded to him, and that he has wielded to the utmost 
against the "truth. He deserves no mercy. His char- 
acter is such, that leniency is a betrayal of the truth 
and his life and conduct are such that silence in regard, 
to them is treason to the truth and duty. His unscru- 
pulous crusade against the truth demands a thorough 
expose of his reai chaiacter. It is no time for squea- 
mishness, for a charity to a falsehood that betrays the 
truth — for monkish sentimentality about clerical or 
•church dignity or for a lackadaisical tenderness to an 
assailant of alb truth and morality, that is unprincipled 
in character, unscrupulous in methods, and relentless 
in warfare. He is too bitter, too reckless, to relentless 
too unprincipled in his warfare, to deserve any lenity 
whatever. 

Believers of the Bible can learn a lesson from the 
modes of warfare resorted to by infidelity, in its at- 
tacks on religion, the church and preachers. Their 
books, pamphlets, papers, harangues and conversation 
turn with attacks on preachers and their families. 
They smell outs such scandals, as buzzards scent car- 
rion, and publish them as widely as possible. No one 
has been more active in such work than Irigersoll him- 
self. If infidels assail preachers and their families, 
they should not object when their warfare is retorted on 
themselves, and the true character of their champion 



88 



INOERSOLL UNMASKED. 



is exposed, and his family veatilated. It is urged that 
Christians should not descend to the levil of Infidelity 
and Ingersoll. If an assailant gets down into the dirt, 
one defending the truth will have to aim low, fling low 
when he is to hit him. An arm}' has to-shoot down to 
the levil of the enemy when they are to hit them, 
and defeat them. If they shoot over them, the silly 
gratification of false pride, that they had shot on a high 
plane, would be poor consolation for defeat by an ene- 
my that took every advantage of the situation, and 
shot to kill. The pretended dignity of such persons is 
as idiotic as Brad dock's insulting refusal to permit 
Washington and his continentals, to fight the Indians 
as the Indians fought. Their modes of warfare would 
be as insane as the attempt of the British general to 
conduct a battle against Indians in the dense forests 
of America, as he would battle against regulars, on an 
open plain in Europe, Dignity may be the proper 
thing in a sermon, in a pulpit, but is as absurd in a. 
warfare against infidelity, as drawing room etiquette 
in lassoing a Texas steer that is running amuck in a 
crowded street. We kill the beast in the speediest 
way possible regardless of dignity. 

The writer has been cautioned that he will create a, 
sympathy for Ingersoll, if he exposed his vile character. 
I regard insinuation as the grossest insult that could be 
offered to the American public. What sort of a cess- 
pool do such persons imagine the American people to 
be, that they insinuate that to tell the truth in regard 
to an unscrupulous villifying assailant of religion and 
morality for the purpose of depriving him of a fictitious 
reputation, that has been fabricated for him and that 
he is utterly unworthy to enjoy, and which he uses as 
his chief power for evil, by exposing his vile character, 
will create a sympathy for him? Exposing a scoundrel 
will create sympathy only among villians. Exposing 



L\< r ERSOLL UN 31 ASKED. 



Ingersoll's real character will create a sympathy for 
him only in the minds of persons as vile as himself; 
but disgust at him in the minds of all decent people, 
The lawyer who prosecutes villians, the press and the 
people, should be very careful not to tell the truth, and 
expose their infamous life and character, lest it create 
a sympathy for them. What disgusting balderdash 
such twaddle is. Persons who make excuses for Ing- 
ersoll, and sympathize with him do so because they 
are like him; and are hit by the expose, just as the 
lawyer said to Jesus, when he was denouncing the 
Scribes; ''Teacher in that saying \ou condemn us al- 
so/' If I remember correctly, Christ did not retract 
what he had said, nor apolize to the lawyer, nor protest 
that he did not mean the lawyers. No he thundered 
out a most scathing denunciation of lawyers, whose 
character led them to sympathize with the villians he 
had denounced 

Christ ought not to have uttered the terrible de- 
nunciations of Math. XXIII, and in other places 
the most scathing expressions in human speech. The 
Holy Spirit in Paul ought not to have uttered the ter- 
rible denunciation of Elymas. It would create sympathy 
for the scoundrel denounced. Exposing crime creates 
sympathy only in the hearts of criminals. Persons 
who sympathize with Ingersoll, when the truth is told, 
are as vile as. he. 

The writer has been told that his expose of Inger- 
soll does not display the spirit that Jesus displayed, 
when he on the cross prayed for his murderers; 
''Father forgive them, they know not what they do." 
Will such !t urco guid saints" answer a few questions? 
Was this prayer of Jesus without Limitation? Did he 
ask God to pardon blasphemous, murderous wretches 
with their hearts full of fiendish hatred, and love of 
blood unrepentant and fiendish in action, disposition 



40 INGERSOLL UNM ASKED. 

and character? If he did could God answer such a 
prayer without trampling under foot reason and jus- 
tice? Can God pardon anyone, unless they repent 
loathe and forsake sin, and, as far as possible, make 
reparation for wrong? Would not the pardon of such 
fiendish murderous wretches, unrepentant full, of 
bloodthirsty hate, be trampling on all right, law and 
government? Was not the spirit of Jesus displayed as 
much in his scourging thieves out of the temple in 
his indignation and anger at vile persons, and in the 
terrible denunciations in Math. XXIII, the most scath- 
ing utterances of human speech; as in the prayer on the 
cross? Did Jesus pray for those of whom he said; 
"Hypocrites' ' "Vipers' brood?' ' 4 l Go on.^Fill up the 
measure of your iniquity. Hew can you escape the 
deep damnation of hell?'' Did the spirit manifested 
by Jesus, in such language, conflict with the spirit of 
his prayer on the cross? Did Jesus, in his debates 
and denunciations, contradict the spirit of the prayer 
on the cross? Taking into account, the character of 
;the persons that called each out, is not one as Christ- 
like as the other? Docs God require us to forgive 
those who are unrepentant, and who persist in mali- 
ctousjefforts to destroy us and who would^trampleundei- 
foot the pearl of forgiveness, and turn and rend lis? 
If we imitate Jesus in the prayer on the cross ought 
not our forgiveness to be limited as his forgiveness was? 
What was the nature of the forgiveness for which he 
prayed? To whom and on what conditions was it to 
be extended? To fiends persisting in fiendishness? 
If we imitate the spirit of the prayer on the cross, when 
in similar circumstances, ought not we to imitate also 
the spirit of the denunciations, if placed, in similar 
circumstances? Is not the spirit of the denunciations 
as much the spirit of Jesus if we are placed in the same 
circumstances as the spirit of the prayer on tiie cross 



□SGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



41 



was the spirit of Jesus, if we are placed in the same 
circumstances, as lie was placed, when he uttered that 
prayer? Does the spirit Jesus displayed in the denun- 
ciations, contradict the spirit lie displayed in any other 
circumstances? Is there not much nonsense talked in 
thoughtless goody-goody moonshine about ''the spirit 
of Jesus?" Did not Jesus denounce with terrible se- 
verity and indignation, the spirit of Ingersoll, the 
spirit of blasphemous rebellion, that rejected and 
sought to destroy the truth, as he does? Do not we 
manifest the spirit of Jesus, when we do the same 
thing under the same circumstances? There is much 
namby-pamby gush now about the "love of God" 
and the ''spirit of Christ/' God can love no one. un- 
less they are worthy of love and only to the extent 
that they are worthy of love, I would not worship a 
God who has not the moral stamina to be indignant 
and angry with iniquity and loathe, hate, and abhor the 
scoundrels who perpetrate it. The Bible knows noth- 
ing of such twaddle as: "Love the villain, but hate his 
villainy". If iniquity should be hated, so should the 
Inqultous scoundrel who rolls iniquity as a sweet mor- 
sel under his tongue. "God abhors the bloody and 
deceitful man.'* "He is angry with the wicked every 
day." 

Doubtless Ingersoll's admirers will howl "Perse- 
cution" "Slander" "Abuse/' But the truth will be 
told notwithstanding. Ingersoll assails and slanders 
Christians, preachers and churches, and his blackers 
applaud to the echo, the ugh he discards the misrep- 
resentation and falsehood. .Advocates of Christianity 
have an undoubted right to tell the truth in regard to 
Ingersoll in reply. Infidel books, pamphlets, papers, 
harangues and talk, teem with slanders of preachers. 
It is all right so long as they are the assailants, but 
all wrong when they are assailed. As the Frenchman 



42 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



declared; "Tiger hunting is glorious sport as long as 
you are hunting the tiger, but soon the sport changes, 
when the tiger takes it into his head to hunt you. T 
The tiger will do his share of the hunting. 

No doubt some weakling, chicken hearted 
profound Christians will shake their heads and timidly 
remonstrate, protesting that such things should not be 
told, and such language should not be used. The 
pearl of forbearance has too long been cast before this- 
infidel slanderer and his only return has been to man- 
gle religion. What a pity that such namby-pamby 
goody-goodies had not been present to remonstrate 
when the Holy Spirit through the prophets denounced 
the Ingersolls of their day. When John and Jesus de- 
nounced the malignant opponents of the truth, as a 
viper's brood. When Jesus thundered out the awful de- 
nunciations of Math. XXIII. When the Holy Spirit in 
Paul addressed Elymas thelngersoll of Cyprus? "O 
full of all craft and malice— envy of all truth— thou 
child of the devil/' Doubtless, had they been present 
like a timid maiden aunt, they would have rolled up 
their eyes, primly puckered their mouths, and pro- 
tested, 1 4 You hadn't orter do so. It is very unpurtg ** 

If a ruffian were to assail w 7 ith slanders and lies, 
one's mother, he would be a base cowardly poltroon v 
who by conceding to the slanderer a character that he 
knew that he was utterly unw r orthy to possess, in- 
creased the slanderer's power to injure her, And 
language cannot express the baseness of one, who 
would object, when the slanderer's vile character was 
exposed by others. His first and highest duty would 
be to drag the slanderer to the light , expose his vile- 
character and strip him of pow r er to injure his mother. 
The most infamous base thing he could do, would be te 
unjustly and untruthfully give to the assaults of the 
slanderer, all the power he could by taking special 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



4K 



pains to ascribe to the slanderer a character of which 
lie knew that he w 7 as utterly destitute. For Chris- 
tians to concede to Ingersoll a character that they 
know he does not possess, and thus give their greatest 
power to his assaults on religion and morality, or to 
object w r hen he is exposed and stripped of his power 
is the basest betrayal of truth of which they can be 
guilty. The first and highest duty is to strip him of 
vSiich power by exposing his real character. 



HklFE AND REAL CHARACTER OF R. G. 
INGERSOIX: 



The father of R. G. Ingersoll was a Congrega- 
tionalist minister, a graduate of Yale college, a man 
of much natural ability , and good education ; and when 
aroused out of his natural indolence, was an eloquent 
speaker, The mother of R. G. Ingersoll, had also 
much natural ability and good education, being a grad- 
uate of Willard Female Seminary, Troy, New York. 
The fact that Ingersoll' s parents were educated, and 
always used good language, accounts for the fact that 
Ingersoll, who has not a good common school educa- 
tion, uses such accurate and good language in his 
speeches and conversations. He was reared in the use 
of such language. Mr. Ingersoll preached in New 
York, New Jersey, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois. The 
mother of R. G. Ingersoll died in New York w T hile he 
was young, and his father married the second time. 
His children mistreated their stepmother, and their 
. father took their part. The wife obtained a divorce, 
He married a third wife in the west, and with the same 
result to the marriage. He moved to southern Illinois 
and married a fourth wife in Mount Vernon, and was 
separated from her when he died. 

In consequence of his indolence, Mr. Ingersoll 
failed as a pastor, did not remain long in a place, and 
was poorly supported. The conduct of his children in- 
creased the difficulty of getting work or retaining a po- 
sition. The boys were rowdies and the girls were reck- 
less loud and fast, and at least one was notoriously 
lewd. Apologists for Ingersoll' s abuse of religion, 
assert that his father was a harsh, stern tyrant, that 
drew his son into Infidelity by his severity and bigotry. 
There never was a more baseless slander. Mr. Inger- 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



soli was censured by his people for his liberality in af- 
filiating with other denominations. He was not a t v 
ranical father, but erred on the opposite extreme. He 
was an over fond indulgent father that never could see 
anything wrong in his children. They could be guilty 
of no misconduct that he would not excuse, and in 
which he would not defend them. He took their part 
against their stepmothers, and drew them away. He 
took their part against congregations that objected to 
their outrageous conduct. R. G. Ingersoll has covered 
himself with infamy, in permitting this lying slander 
of his over indulgent father, that he knew to be in- 
famously false, to be retailed. Instead of denouncing 
it as an .honest man ( to say nothing of an affectionate 
son) would do, he allows it to be retailed all over th« 
land that religion may be injured. When R. G. 
Ingersoll portrays the indulgence he would allow in 
the family he portrays what obtained in his father's 
family, what ruined him and the rest of the family: 
and of which R. G. Ingersoll is the legitimate fruit. 
It was not severity but the opposite extreme, that 
gave to R, G. Ingersoll an unrestricted oppbrtuuin 
to display the evil that was in him. From early boy- 
hood R. G. Ingersoll was known wherever his father 
lived as a lawless, reckless, disobedient rowdy, uncon- 
trolled and spoiled by his father's indulgence. He 
was profane, obscene, rude and unfeeling. He was 
irregular in attendance at school, and never finished < ? 
common school course. 

He attempted to study law in Greenville, Illinois, 
and was dismissed by his preceptor for idleness, 
worthless, bad conduct and character. He was with 
his father when Mr. Ingersoll made his first visit to 
Marion Illinois. Judge W. A, Sennua, of Carbondale, 
Illinois, who witnessed the scene, says that when Mr 
Ingersoll was on his knees praying, as he was con 



M 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



ducting family worship in the home of N. B« Calment, 
R. G. interrupted his father with; "Now father that 
is all nonsense, and you know it." As patiently 
as though such outrageous conduct was perfectly 
proper, Mr. Ingersoll spent some time in reasoning 
with him, and completed his prayer, As Mr. Inger- 
soll had separated from his wife, a daughter known as 
Mrs. Frisbie kept house for him. During a church 
social held in Mr. Ingersoll' s residence, this daughter 
was caught in the act. of lewdness, with a well known 
man, and the company immediately left the house 
in disgust. She had, while in Marion, an illegit- 
imate child the paternity of which was doubtful, though 
charged on one of the leading men in Southern Illinois. 
Elder A. Benson, one of the most reliable men in 
Southern Illinbis, who was in the pulpit with Mr. Ing- 
gersoll, narrates this incident. One Sunday afternoon 
Mr. Ingersoll changed his sermon into a harangue de- 
fending his children. He defended his sons, who were 
notorious, especially R. G. for profanity, obscenity, 
lewdness, gambling and drunkenness, and pointing to 
Mrs. Frisbie, who w 7 as present, exclaimed: 4 'They 
have even dared to assail my noble- daughter!" Per- 
sons were present who had caught her in the act of 
lewdness in his own house, and others who had left the 
house in disgust when they learned it. And then there 
was in the cradle in his home, her illegitimate child, 
and her lewdness was notorious and shameless. It was 
such folly as this, and not severity that ruined Mr. 
Ingersoll s family. 

During the years that the family lived in Marion, 
R. G. would often, and especially on Monday after his 
father had preached in Marion^ denounce his father's 
preaching with profanity and blasphemy, and denounce 
his father as a fool and hypocrite. He would assail 
his father on the streets and in cJowds, and Mr, Inger- 



INGE RSOLL UNMASKED. 



47 



soli would expostulate and reason with him, only to re- 
ceive abuse in return. It was over-indulgence and lack 
of restraint that ruined R. G. Ingersoll, instead of se- 
verity and bigotry. People of Marion observed with 
much amusement, THAT INGERSOLL NEVER 
MENTIONED HIS CAREER IN MARION, WHEN- 
GIVING MATERIAL FOR A SKETCH OF HIS 
LIFE. THERE IS A REASON FOR HIS SIL- 
ENCE. As a result of the conduct of his 
family, and Mr. Ingersoll' s folly in taking 
their part against the people, Mr. Ingersoll received 
poor support in Marion. Instead of working 
and assisting his over burdened father, Pv. G. Ingersoll 
loafed in idleness, in saloons and places of low resort, 
on the streets, around the public square, and sponged 
his living off of his over burdened father. Occasion- 
ally, he would do a little writing for a merchant, or in 
an office to get a little money to spend in a debauch, 
w T hen he could obtain it no other way. His time ex- 
cept the few hours that he was compelled to labor to 
get money to gratify his lusts, was spent in loafing, 
gambling and drinking, in low company, and in places 
of low resort. If there was a scrub horse race, a fight, 
a drunken row, or a dog fight, R. G. Ingersoll was the 
nosiest rowdy present, but always was careful not to 
get into a fight himself . Robert Pully and other citi- 
zens tell of seeing him stoned as he reeled across the 
public square out of a house of ill-fame, where he had 
spent hours. In a drunken row he undertook to clean 
out a grog-shop. As he was smashing things, Davis, 
the proprietor, hurled a tumbler at him, and tore a por- 
tion of his ear loose from his head. His blood was in 
such a condition, from his vile life, that it was feared 
that he would lose his ear, if not his life. There is 
still on the records of Williamson County an indict- 
ment against him for being engaged in a drunken riot. 



48 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



He would drink and gamble in all places, and at all 
hours, regardless of shame. All that has been said and 
more in regard to his wild life in Marion can be proved 
by Robert Pulley, F. M. Goodall, John Goodall, C. J. 
Campbell, S. H. Bundy and scores ot old residents of 
Marion and Williamson County. 

Chaplain R. C. White of McKinney, Texas, says 
that Mr. Ingersoll came to Waverly, Tennessee, with 
R, G. and appealed to the people to help him save, his 
son, who was going to destruction. On the most pos- 
itive pledges of good conduct, a select school was got- 
ten up for him. After a few months effort to maintain 
an outward appearance of decency (he was drinking in 
secret and gambling) his sister, Mrs. Frisbie came to 
him, with her illegitimate child, and kept house for 
him. Her conduct became so infamous that they were 
warned to leave town, and they left. Col. J. M. Clem- 
mentson of McKinney Texas, says that when Ingersoll 
and Mrs. Frisbie returned to Marion from Tennessee, 
such was their reputation that no hotel or family in 
Marion would receive them, and they had to go out in- 
to the country to the home of Hopper, a drunken boon 
companion of Ingersoll, until the brothers rented a 
hovel, in which Mrs. Frisbie kept house and main- 
tained her reputation for lewdness. 

From Marion, 111., the Ingersolls, the brothers 
and sister drifted to Harrisburg and then to Shawnee- 
town. There is on the records of Saline County an in- 
dictment against R. G. Ingersoll for making, in a 
drunken rage, a murderous assault with a knife on an 
old man. In all of these indictments Ingersoll escaped 
punishment by skipping out at time ot trial, and the 
court let him go, because he w r as not worth the cost of 
prosecution. These indictments are matters of court 
record. 

The Ingersolls were the most rabid, foul-mouthed 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



49 



demagogues in Southern Illinois. E. C. Ingersoll got 
an appointment under Buchanon, and the brothers and 
sister moved to Peoria. S A. North of Carbondale, 
says the>- came to Carbondale to take the train for Peo- 
rio in a rickety, ramshackle of a one horse wagon, 
drawn by an old crowbait of a horse, with scarcely 
enough rope harness to haul the crew, and all their 
possessions were in a small goods box. When one rec- 
ollects that R. G. Ingersoll was a young man and sin- 
gle, how he had spent his youth and manhood thus far, 
his worthlessness can be seen by his beggarly appear- 
ance at the depot. Mr. Redding one of the most re- 
liable men in Peoria, says that when the Ingersolls 
came to Peoria they were so poor that that they could 
not pay for an old carpet that was on the floor of the 
room they rented, and so worthless that the owner 
would not trust them, and it was removed. In Peoria 
for years R. G. Ingersoll was infamous for obscenity, 
profanity, blasphemv, drunkenness, lewdness aud ruf- 
fianism/ G, W. H." Gilbert declared to W. R. Allen, 
that the drunkenness and lewdness of Ingersoll was 
beastly. He would take a jug of rum and a prostitute 
and spend days in a room in a drunken debauch. Judge 
Louck declared to Mr. Allen that for years Ingersoll 
was addicted to the most shameless drunkenness and 
lewdness. He would spend days in a drunken debauch 
in a brothel, until his friends found him and took him 
home. Hundreds can testify to seeing him reel through 
the streets drunk, often for a period of years, and scores 
to seeing him led or hauled home drunk, sometimes on 
a dray. 

Mr. Buskirk, an old and well known citizen told 
Rev. Schwartz that in a drunken row in a brothel 
Ingersoll undertook to beat a prostitute and she cut his 
scalp with a beer mug, and that Ingersoll got a scar 
on his scalp in that way. A man was murdered in a 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



drunken row in a grog shop, and all circumstances 
that could be learned pointed to Ingersoll, who was 
the most active assailant of the murdered man, as the 
one who had struck the fatal blow. Ingersoll usually 
spent his Sundays in beer gardens, saloons, barrooms 
and places of low resort. The profane, the drunken, 
the vile would flock around him like buzzards around 
carrion and roar over the vile blasphemous jokes and 
yarns that he would belch forth by the hour. Central 
Illinois is rotten with vile jokes and yarns that are as- 
cribed to him. If one hears a peculiarly vile blasphe- 
mous joke or yarn, and inquires, "Who originated 
that abminable thing ?' ' The reply is. "O that's one 
of Bob Ingersoll' s yarns." If he can catch a preacher 
in a crowd he loves to tell an inexpressibly filthy story 
in regard to the material of which preacher's are made* 
as Rev. W. T. Maupin and other preachers can testify. 

In 1S60 he ran for Congress on the Pro-slavery 
Democratic ticket with the Fugitive Slave Law and 
the Dred Scott decision as his platform. L. S. Brick- 
er and others testify that at Farmington he was too 
drunk to stand on the platform prepared. Dr. Holi- 
day testifies that at Decatur he was so drunk, that he 
had to be led across the stage to keep from falling. 
At Rigdon, Mr. Graham and others saw him run out 
back of the place of speaking and spew up his gorge 
of sod corn whisky, wipe the spew off his clothes be- 
fore he returned to the building to speak. L. V. 
Taft, then editing a paper advocating his election to 
Congress, says that at Maquon he was so drunk that 
in reeling through a store, he fell and plunged both 
hands in a tub of butter. In the afternoon he was too 
drunk to stand on the dry goods box used as a plat- 
form, and the crowd indignantly hissed him. Clutch- 
ing the end of the box with one hand he reeled back 
and forth, shaking his fist at the crowd, in which were 



INGERSOLL UN M ASKE D. 



51 



many ladies, and ioared out the foulest obscenity an \ 
blasphemy. Then he reeled off a few rods, and in 
plain sight of the crowd attended to one of the calls 
of nature. Persons are still living who saw and can 
testify to these disgusting facts. When W. F. Crafts 
stated these facts, and they were published in the 
Chicago papers, all the reply that Ingersoll attempted, 
was to state in the "Times" that he was in no condi- 
tion that day to know what occurred. 

lugersoir s admirers give him great credit for hat- 
red of slavery and love of liberty. He is continually 
abusing the Bible, preachers, churches, and christians, 
for having been pro slavery. One would think that 
he must have been an original abolitionist, and a 
martyr for his anti-slaver}* sentiments. The truth is 
that he was aU hk life until Lincoln made him Colonel 
of an Illinois calvary regiment the foulest mouthed 
and most rabid pro-slavery demagogue in Illinois. If, 
as he loves to assert, churches and preachers made a 
whipping post of the cross of Christ, he was just as 
active in making a whipping post of every American 
flagstaff. Mr. Redding and others say that during 
the winter and spring of 1861, his denunciations of 
the incoming administration were so disloyal, and his 
sympathy with those who were seceding was so out- 
spoken, that he was not called on to speak in the first 
war meetings in Peoria, because all regarded him as on 
the side of the rebellion. When he saw what was the 
popular side he made what the politicians call a "flop" 
to become a colonel of a regiment. The shameless- 
ness of his denunciations of preachers and churches for 
being pro slavery before the rebellion is simply bound- 
less, but he never tells his audience that he once ad- 
vocated slavery himself. 

Once when his regiment paraded the streets of 
Peoria, he w T as so drunk that he had to be watched to- 



52 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



keep him on his horse. Although he ostentatiously 
wears on all occasions the title ''Colonel," and his 
admirers dub him "Colonel," when it is possible, his 
military record was infamous, he neglected his duties 
and other officers, especially the Major, had to attend 
to them. He spent his time in loafing and carousing 
with boon companions. In a calvary reconnoissance 
in Hallock's advance on Corinth, he was run into a 
cattle and hog yard by a boy of sixteen, to whom he 
surrendered. This is stated by members of his regi- 
ment who saw it, and Major Ransom, the Confederate 
officer to whom he gave up his sword. The rebel 
military authorities expressed their contempt for him, 
so H. L,. Hastings of Boston, a widely known author 
and publisher wrote to me. The question has been 
often asked why Ingersoll resigned his commission in 
the field, in the face of the enemy when in good 
health. Rev. W. J. Beck of Anita, Iowa, informed 
the writer that he learned from Thomas Paul of Mal- 
nem, Iowa, a captain in Ingersoll' s regiment, and 
from other officers of the regiment, that Ingersoll re- 
signed because he knew that charges would be pre- 
sented, that would compel him to face a court-martial 
for immoral conduct, negro wenches visiting his tent, 
drunkness and so on. 

When Owen Lovejoy died, E. C. Ingersoll suc- 
ceeded him in Congress. Peoria is the largest distill- 
ing point in the United States. E. C. Ingersoll in 
Congress and R. G. IngersolFin Peoria were leaders of 
the Peoria Branch of the infamous Whisky Ring. E. 
C. in Congress saw that the right men were put into the 
revenue service, and R. G. in Peoria saw that they did 
the work desired by the ring. When one man refused 
to perjure himself for forty-five thousand dol- 
lars, he was removed and one who would, was put in 
his place. The Ingersolls had all their lives till this 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



53 



time been as poor as church mice. E. C. soon be- 
-came rich on his salary as Congressman. He was one 
of the most aotorious gamblers that ever disgraced 
Washington. His chief notoriety in Washington, is 
that he swindled certain men out of fifteen thousand 
dollars in one night's gambling. R. G. Ingeisoll be- 
gan to invest money in his wife's name. He never 
owned property in Peoria and his note never was 
negotiable there His word and financial honor and 
responsibility were worthless R. G. Ingersoll was 
repeatedly charged with embezzling the money of 
clients. He embezzled the money of a firm in Detroit, 
Michigan, and when their attorney called on them af- 
ter a lecture in Jackson, Michigan, and demanded a 
settlement, he was insulted and defied with abuse and 
profanity. Ingersoll returned to Peoria from Wash- 
ington, and a client (whose money he embezzled got 
out papers for his arrest and had all trains watched, 
and compelled a settlement. His greatest case in court 
was a defense of the infamous Dorsey, leader of the 
infamous gang of Star Route thieves, for half of the 
swag his pal Darsey had stolen from the Government. 

Affecting great love of liberty, he has ever bee:: 
the paid tool of rings, trusts and monopolies, as lawver 
and politician. In [868 R. G. Ingersoll canvassed Illi- 
nois for nomination for Governor, on the Republican 
ticket. He visited Lincoln in Logan County. He got 
on a drunken debauch and in a row in a grogshop, he 
undertook to clean out the saloon with a gold headed 
cane, that his admirers had presented to him. William 
Fettit, City policeman, arrested him as he was smashing 
bottles and glasses with his cane, and threw him into 
the calaboose, where he lay for several hours, until his 
political friends bailed him out and shipped him off on 
the first train. When he visited Decatur to lecture on 
4 'Progress/' the State Sunday School Convention was 



54 



INGEBSOLL UNMASKED, 



in session in a wigwam erected for its use by the citi- 
zens of Decatur. To the great mortification of ''the 
genius of the west," but few were out to hear "the 
silver tongued orator," and he was as the Frenchman 
expressed it, "Very much disgoost." He vented his 
spleen in a tirade of abuse of churches, Sunday Schools 
and religion. Unfortunately for him, among the few 
present, were several prominent republicans, who were 
attending the Convention, and had left it that night to 
hear -the man they expected to support for next Gov- 
ernor of Illinois. Disgusted with and indignant at 
Ingersoll's outrageous abuse of religion, they went 
into the Convention the next morning and told what 
Ingersoll had done, and the workers in the Convention 
went home resolved to prevent Ingersoll's nomination. 
He was overwhelmingly defacted to retire to private 
life, and by the suffrages of the people has held that 
position ever since. This is the secret of IngersoWs spleen 
against the churches, and explain* what he mean* by his clam- 
or pre freedom* from the dominion of the church. 

One would suppose from the talk of Ingersolf's 
admirers that any and all positions in political life have 
for years, been at his call. He was nominated for 
Congress by the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic 
party in 1 860, when all knew that there was no chance 
of election, and the nomination was not desired by any 
man of standing. He was elected to the lower house 
of the Illinois legislature. Since his defeat in his can- 
vass for nomination for govenor, he has not dared to 
try to secure a nomination for any office: His infidels 
clackers raised a clamor to have him sent as minister to 
Berlin by Hayes and again to have him appointed At- 
torney General by Garfield. He had no respectable 
show in either effort, and signally failed. His last ef- 
fort was to represent the District of Columbia as a Dei- 
igate to the Republican National Convention, and he 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



55 



was defeated by a negro. In the convention he tried 
to have the honor of making the nominating speech 
for Blaine, and was refused it. He was rejected by 
the National committee in selecting speakers in 1S S0 
and 1884. He sulked in 1888 and 1892 and declared 
that he was out of politics. He never had, and does 
not now have any influence or prestige in politics. 

We will now give miscellaneous instances illustra- 
ting his life, character and work. In an- interview 
with a reporter of the "Post Dispatch" of St. Louis, 
occurs this language: "Why the d-d-rant ( speaking of 
and extract he was charged with stealing) is not my 
doctrine at all. ' ' Perhaps his admirers can convince 
persons of sense that a man who will indulge in such 
vulgar profanity, knowing that it would appear in a pa- 
per does not swear. Dr. John Potts, an eniment Cana- 
dian preacher was compelled to listen to Iugersoll's 
conversation on a train for hours, as Ingersoll and sev- 
eral boon companions took the two seats in front of him. 
It was frequenth' profane, often obscene, and always 
■course and vulgar. There was no suggestion of the 
polished gentleman and profound scholar of infidel 
boasting. We will give at the close the testimony of 
B. W. Johnson of his profanity, obscenity and blasphe- 
my. A banker in Lewistown, Illinois, said, "I can tell 
when Ingersoll is in town by the crowd of lewd, vile 
characters that are congregated around him,, and the 
vile laughter that I hear, I know he is in the midst 
telling his vile yarns, and getting off his vile jokes." 
Said a landlord in Rariton, Illinois, "I do not like to 
liave him come to my house. All the low. lewd, and 
vile flock around him, like buzzards to carrion, and 
profanity, obscenity and blasphemy are poured out un- 
til midnight, and roared over." Hundreds of similar 
statements can be given, Ingersoll assails Sunday 



m INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



Schools, churches, preaching, religious meetings and 
worship. Judging by the way he spent his Sundays 
in Peoria, he would substitue loafing around beer gar- 
dens, grogshops and places of low and vile resort, and 
.belching forth vile yarns, profanity , obscenity and bias- 
phemy for the ennobling practices of Christians. One 
Sunday in a beer garden near Peoria, he sprinkled a 
baby with beer, in blasphemous mockery of the ordi- 
nance of baptism. 

In a national convention of infidels, called and 
led fry himself, Ingersoll offered a resolution that was 
unanimously adopted, justifying the cause of the in- 
famous Bennett, editor of the infamous "Truth Seek- 
er," who was in jail for peddling vile literature. He 
signed a petition for the pardon of Heywood in state 
prison for peddling vile literature, and headed a 
crusade to have him pardoned. He headed a petition 
and led a crusade for the repeal of postal laws, 
closing the mails against vile literature 
and instruments of vice. He tried to get a 
chance to speak in advocacy of the petition before the 
Senate Committee, to whom it was referred. He has 
lied in the columns of the ' 'Christian Advocate' 1 of 
New York, and in scores of public statements, oral 
and written, denying these facts, and has had his 
lies crammed down his throat by the records of our 
national government. The Senate Committee, in their 
report, that is a part of our national records, speak of 
the petition as "the petition of R. G. Ingersoll and 
others/' and as a petition "to open the U. S. mails to 
the circulation of vile literature and instruments of 
vice/' 

The sister of one of the leading business men, 
( Walcott Day, if I have not forgotten the name, ) in 
Peoria, a lady much esteemed for her culture and re- 
finement, at the request of Ingersoll made a call at his 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



57 



house. After some conversation, chiefly on religious 
topics, refreshments including wine were brought in. 
Ingersoll poured out a glass and raised it with a toss, 
and exclaimed in regular bar room style: 4 'Here's to 
Jesus Christ." Calling instantly for her wraps, the 
insulted lady said indignantly: "Mr. Ingersoll, others 
can do as they please, but when you mock and insult, 
my Savior in my presence I will not submit to it. I 
will resent it" and immediately left the ruffian's pres- 
ence. Mr. Bishop, son of R. M. Bishop, once Gover- 
nor of Ohio, says that once when compelled with other 
passengers to change sleepers about midnight in. 
Toledo, Ohio, Ingersoll stood on the platform with his 
wife and daughters at his side, and with a crowd of 
passengers and railroad men around him, he indulged 
in the most disgusting profanity, w T hile others gazed 
at him in astonishment, and listened to him with dis- 
gust. A banker living in McKinney, Texas, with his 
wife stopped at the same hotel, w T ith Ingersoll in Ro- 
chester, New York. When a number of ladies and 
gentlemen came down to take the omnibus for the 
train, Ingersoll flew into a rage, because his agent had 
not settled the bill, and cursed and swore, to the 
amazement and disgust of a score of ladies and gentle- 
men standing around. 

In a hotel at Lake George, New 7 York, he got a 
gentleman to introduce him to Joseph Cook. When 
Mr, Cook extended his hand, Ingersoll roared: *'G-d 
d-m you, do you know w T hat I have a great mind tc 
do. I have a great mind to knock you down, you 
d — d sneak." Mr. Cook stopped and ordered the 
ruffian out of his presence. In a parlor in the Todd 
House in Youngstown, Ohio, a blind gentleman, Mr. 
Campbell, editor of the "Y T oungstown News'' in the 
presence of Mr. Justice and several others, remaaked 
to Ingersoll, though I am sceptical, I can not accept 



3^ 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



all that you say," Ingersoll roared out 4 'Well g-d 
d-n you, who has asked you to accept it." Mr. 
Campbell and the greater portion of the company left 
the ruffian in disgust. 

Ingersoll was fined in Lincoln, Illinois, by Judge 
Shafer, for profanity and ruffianism in court. During 
the trial of Dorsey, the Star Route thief, in Washing- 
ton, Ingersoll' s shallowness as a lawyer subjected him 
to several defeats through his blunders. He flew into 
.a rage and cursed and swore and was fined for his 
ruffianism. It is not long since he was fined in a New 
York court, for profanity and ruffianism. Rev. H. 
W. Robertson states that in a political speech in Ur- 
bana, Illinois, he indulged in profanity, and preachers 
and many others left the platform and audience in con- 
tempt. Capt. Shepherd of Carbondale, states that in 
the first sentence in a political harangue to which he 
listened, Ingersoll insulted the audience with profanity. 
In 1876 in Chickering Hall, New York, in a lecture 
he said : ' 'Burns went to the Scotch grogshop, in- 
stead of the Scotch Church, and I honor him for it," 
and a large portion of the audience left the hall in dis- 
gust. In Belleville, Illinois and in Lacon, Illinois, 
and other places, persons, especially ladies, have left 
his audiences on account of his profanity. He insult- 
ed a lecture committee in Muncie, Indiana, by profan- 
ity in a letter. He insulted Rev. A. M. Cpllis, M. D. 
of Cameron, Missouri, with obscenity in a letter. 

The loungers were once discussing baptism in his 
presence. One of them, Mr. Meek, of Eureka, Illi- 
nois, appealed to Ingersoll to settle a point of criticism. 
"O, h— 11 ! baptism is not worth a G — d d — n without 
lots of soap. ' ' A gentleman, then a clerk in Washing- 
ton, told Rev. Charles Winbigler of Columbia, Pa., 
that in his presence in a meat shop in Washington, Iiir 
gersoll remarked as he pointed to a piece of meat : 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



59 



^That'saG — d d — d pretty piece of meat for Jesus 
Christ to make/' enjoying the laugh of the loungers 
who laughed at his disgusting blasphemous idiocy. 
Profanity, obscenity, and blasphemy are the point of 
Ms attempts at wit. "Ingersoll and his family once 
visited a gentleman near Peoria," says Enoch Emery, 
former editor of the "Peoria Transcript/' The host 
returned thanks. The Ingersoll' s looked at each oth- 
er and snickered at his ''saying something to his 
plate." 

As already proved Ingersoll was for years a notor- 
ious drunkard. Although not so shamlessly now, he 
still drinks. A young man from Peoria, who studied 
law with him in New York City, told Judge Louck of 
Peoria, that Ingersoll keeps himself soaked in wine, 
and is almost constantly, more or less, under the in- 
fluence of liquor. He has liquor on his table and 
drinks it. Not long ago he wrote a rhapsody over a 
jug of liquor that his admirers sent him. The clerk 
of the Todd House in Youngstown. Ohio, told S. L. 
Clark, a lawyer in Youngstown, that he spent a night 
after a lecture in a drunken debauch in that hotel. 
Rev. J. C. Keezell, President of Philomath College. 
Philomath. Oregon, says that Ingersoll and his princi 
pal backers in Corvallis, Oregon, were brought home 
from a fishing excursion dead drunk. His wife or 
daughter goes with him on his trips, specially his lec- 
ture trips, to watch him and keep him from getting 
drunk. We will close with one more. When his ad- 
mirers were clamoring for his appointment as minister 
to Berlin, he visited Washington to logroll for himself. 
It was fatal to his effort. He loafed around the Cap- 
itol, Committee rooms, and public places, telling yarns 
and indulging in profanitv. He would speak of Christ 
as <c Mr. Christ," "J. Christ, " "Mi. J. Christ." Al- 
though men might laugh at his ruffiianism, buffoonery 



60 



IX GEE SOL L UNMASKED. 



and blasphemy, they were all disgusted with the idea- 
of such a person representing our nation in one of the- 
leading courts of the world. R. W. Taylor of Youngs- 
town. Ohio, then an official in Washington is the au- 
thority for this statement 

Infidels publish as widely as the} can, and gloat 
over ever}' instance that they can parade of the mis- 
conduct of preachers and their families. Jamison, 
Bennett, Billings and others have published pamphlets 
and books for the sole purpose of retailing such slan- 
ders, and infidels circulate them as widely as they 
can. Ingersoil has been very active in such work. 
Infidels boast incessantly of Ingersoil' s family, as a 
model family, holding it up in contrast with preachers* 
families. They boastingly contrast Ingersoil with 
preachers. As they have challenged the comparison, 
the challenge will be accepted, and light let into this 
infidel holy of holies. Major Barry, a lawyer of Chi- 
cago, in a letter in his own hand writing, and over bis 
own signature, in the possession of the writer, admits 
that he told J. M. Wiley, a prominent citizen of Golna 
Illinois, this incident: with several other gentlemen 
he took supper with Ingersoil and his family. Inger- 
soil joked and told yarns, such as low persons tell in 
low crowds, interluding his conversation with oaths, 
though wife., daughters and nieces were present. His 
daughters and nieces drank wine, until they were so 
much under its influences, that one had to be taken 
from the table. Ingersoil laughed and s\vore at her 
for being "such a d — d fool as to get tight." When; 
Mr. Barry left in disgust, Ingersoil followed him to 
the door, and laughed at him ; and called him a "d — d 
blue bellied Presbyterian''' when he was told why 
Major Barry left. 

Infidels and Ingersoil and family have tried to 
create a sympathy for Ingersoil and family, and a pre,- 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



6: 



judice against the writer, for assailing Ingersoll's fam- 
ily, assailing his daughters, defenceless girls. Do 
infidels ever for one moment hesitate to assail preach- 
ers' families, wives and daughters, from any such con- 
siderations ? Why is it not right to treat their lect- 
urers' families as they have in innumerable instances, 
-treated the families of Christian preachers ? And as 
they have defied the comparison by their boasts, why 
shall the falsehood of the boasts not be exposed ? If 
they w r ere not willing to have the comparison tested, 
why did they defy it ? They can not so independents 
and defiantly make such claims for Ingersoll and chal- 
lenge a comparison w r ith preachers' families, and whine 
when their challenge is accepted , the comparison made, and 
the falsehood of their cla im , that IngersolV s family is a model 
family, and so superior to the families of the preachers, ex- 
posed. This explodes an infidel boast, and strips in- 
fidelity of a weapon it has used for years, on all occa- 
" sions, in assailing religion. Though not a pleasant 
duty to perform, it is an imperative one, and is done 
as an act of duty, owed to the cause of religion and 
truth. 

W. R. Allen's, Investigation. 

At the request of the writer Mr. W. P. Allen of 
Cambridge, 111., spent several days in Peoria, carefully 
investigating and gives these facts: S. G. Whitford 
-an architect said that Ingersoll's life was reckless and 
wild, until he w r anted to be governor in 1862. Since 
then he had some regard for decency, G. W. H. Gil- 
bert had known Ingersoll since he came to Peoria, and 
liked some traits in his character. But his drunkenness 
and his lewdness at times were beastly. He would 
take a jug of whisky and a prostitute and spend days 
in a room in a beastly debauch. A prominent officer 
of the Y. M. C. A. said the reason that the charges 



*2 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



made so little stir in Peoria, was that they were known 
to be true. A venerable old gentleman, Mr. Palmer, 
said that most of the charges were known in Peoria to 
be true, In regard to Mayor Warner and others who 
wrote commendations of Ingersoll, Judge McCulloch 
said the writers w r ere utterly wanting in moral charac- 
ter necessary to give sanction to any cause in w 7 hich 
chastity or temperance were considered. Such recom- 
mendations would smut even Ingersoll. R. H. Arnold 
said that Warner and Puterbaugh were better fitted to 
recommend a brothel or saloon, than anything decent. 
It w^as common street talk that Warner kept a mistress. 
Puterbaugh was a sot and familiary know T n as ''Old 
Grimes." Warner had an election bee in his bonnet, 
and his letter was a sop to catch Ingersoll' s whisky 
friends. Judge Louck had known the Ingersolls since 
they came to Peoria. The father was a good and tal- 
ented man. At one time E. C. was a respected mem- 
ber of the Episcopal Church In early manhood 
R. G. w 7 as addicted to shameless lewdness and drunk- 
enness. 

He would go to a brothel, and remain there in a 
drunken debauch day after day, until friends would go- 
and take him home. He had moderated his evil hab- 
its, for if he had not, he would have been in his grave. 
From the correspondence in the Transkript it appeared 
that Ingersoll's admirers had been puffing Ingersoll, 
as a model man, and Braden had stated some of the 
facts, as unsavory dish, but true. He believed Inger- 
soll to be mercenary and hypocritical. A friend of 
his, who had been a student in Ingersoll's office in 
Xew York, told him that Ingersoll kept himself pick- 
led in wine, and although inclined to skepticism, this 
friend was disgusted with Ingersoll's Irypocricy and 
drinking habits. 

Puterbaugh' s reputation was best where he was 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



63 



least known. He was elected Judge once, but had to 
resign on account of drunkenness ; and his reputation 
abroad was based on a work stolen from Mr. Boale. 
Such was the universal lauguage of old residents oi 
Peoria, who were not in the Infidel, Whisky, Ingersoll 
crew 



JNGERSOLL'S REAL STANDING AS A SCHOL- 
AR, WRITER AND SPEAKER. 



It is constantly asserted that Ingersoll is a grad- 
uate of Yale College. That he is a prodigy of learn- 
ing, scholarship, reading, information, knowledge and 
erudition. His harangues are ostentatiously adver- 
tised as the best result of modern scholarship. He 
never saw Yale until late in life. He never graduated 
from any school. He has never seen the time when 
by fair examination he could have obtained a third 
grade certificate in Illinois to teach a County District 
school. He hasn't a good common school education. 
In a reply to an article of the writer, John Warner 
then Mayor of Peoria, and Ingersoll' s principal 
champion in Peoria, admitted in the "Madison Star" of 
Madison, Indiana, in December 1881, that it was true 
that he could not get a third grade certificate to teach 
a common district school. He is not a well read law- 
yer. He is a failure as counsel and in management of 
a case, and in all work where legal knowledge and 
reading are required. He is a success only when rant, 
declamation and abuse such as he abounds in, when 
assailing religion, are used to bulldoze a jury. He 
spent his time in loafing and telling yarns, and not in 
reading or studying. Such is his reputation with the 
bar of Illinois, Washington and New York City, and 
wherever persons have known his real qualifications, 
where he has by acquaintance and test been stripped 
of a false reputation fabricated for him, by falsehood. 
He should be stripped of the stolen plumage, and reduc- 
ed to his true jackdaw dimensions. He is the most 
shameless plagiarist living. When he was logrolling 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



65 



for the mission to Berlin, tinder Hayes, there went 
the rounds of the press a matchless piece of word 
painting, a denunciation of intemperance, purporting 
to be a quotation from a speech that Ingersoll made 
when defending D. W. Munn. one of the Whisky 
JRing. Again he was logrolling to be Attorney Gen- 
eral under Garfield, it went the rounds of the pre-- a 
second time. He never uttered in the Munn trial a 
-word in denunciation of intemperance. Why should 
lie, when defending a Whisky Ring thief? The quo- 
tation was stolen from Dr. Gunn's '/Family Physician" 
only one word being changed. For years Ingersoll 
permitted the publication of this quotation, as his own, 
in thousands of papers, and appropriated all the eclat 
it gave him. Twice it went the general round of the 
press, and each time he was logrolling for an oppor- 
tunity, and temperance sentiments were popular with 
trie president and his family, Ingersoll and his Lack- 
ers appropriated and used all the credit of the lan- 
guage and its sentiment, until the writer exposed the 
theft. Then the best excuse that Ingersoll could offer 
was, that some one, no one knows who. for some in- 
conceivable reason, had published the extracts as the 
language of Ingersoll. Why should any one do a 
thing so utterly without reason, purpose or motive ? 
Why did not Ingersoll instantly publish the truth and 
disclaim it ? Why did he allow this quotation for 
years to be published as his language, appropriating 
the fame it gave him ? Why was it published just 
when he was logrolling for office, and used to aid him 
in such efforts ? The excuse is as idiotic as the theft 
was shameless. 

Prof. Otto Kottichky of Cape Girardeau, Mo., 
published in the "Globe Democrat? 9 of December 9th. 
1884, that whole pages of Ingersoll 1 s ['Mistakes '/ 
Moses," were plagiarized from "Evidences Against 



66 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



Christianity ,' ' a book published in London in 1809 
fifteen years before Ingersoll was born, written I 
James Hittell. Robert Allyn, D. D., President 
the Southern Illinois Normal University, stated that- 
large portions of Ingersoll' s "Gods" were plagiarized: 
from "The Leviathan of Hobbes" "The Ruins of Em- 
pires/ 1 by Volney, and " The Encyclopedia 5 ' edited by 
Voltaire, and showed the books from which they were 
plagiarized. Ingersoll' s "Ghosts" is plagiarized 
largely from D. Alemberts "System of Nature " 
PhiladelphiajDaper published in parallel columns t : . 
speech Ingersoll made over the grave of a child m 
Washington, and a piece of blank verse by an En - 
glish poet, and proved that Ingersoll' s speech was 
simply the poetry changed into prose. In 1882 Rev. 
J. M. Truitt in Henderson, Texas, charged Ingersoll 
with plagiarism. Ingersoll J s admirers headed by tht 
members of Congress in that district, denied the charge 
Mr. Truitt delivered them, lectures and read from 
Ingersoll and from books, and Ingersoll' s admirers, 
the Congressmen with the rest, admitted that he had. 
overwhelmingly proved his charge. 

The truth is that Ingersoll is not a reasoner. He 
never made an argument. He is merely a declaimex^ 
of splurgy, spread eag 1 e word painting, and of clown- 
ish ridicule and buffoonery, caricature of falsehood. 
He is not a scholar, a reader, a man of erudition, or 
kno wledge on any topic. He is compelled to steal all 
argument and lesults of erudition that he uses. The 
Dan Rice part of his speeches are original. No speak 
er repeats himself so much as Ingersoll. When one 
reads his "Gods," he has more than nine-tenths of 
the ideas presented in all of his lectures. Though he 
has published lectures under over one hundred titles, 
fo ^r can be selected that contain t\ ery idea he has ex- 
pressed in the hundred, and these four are largely 



TXGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



repetitions of each other. There are about a dozen 
declamatory assertions assailing the Bible, that are 
nearly all in every lecture, and sometimes several are re- 
peated in a lecture. He cannot lecture six nights to 
the same audience, without wearing out or driving 
away his audience by repetition. He did this in Nev; 
York. The first night the hall was crowded. The 
second night crowds could not get seats. He hired 
Gilmore's Garden for the third night, or for a week, 
but the audiences saw the second night that his talk: 
was merely a repetition of the first night, and he did 
not have, in the Garden that could seat nine thousand 
an audience of five hundred. He. went back to the 
Hall the fourth night and played out for want of an 
audience. 

No one has made as much use of the trick of ad- 
vertising an old lecture under a new title, or repetition 
of old lecture under a new name. In this way he has 
faked more than a hundred lectures out of two or three. 
His lack of scholarship, information, reading, ' knowl- 
edge, erudition, and argument, accounts for his cow- 
ardice in refusing to debate. His little stock of bor- 
rowed ideas would soon be exhausted. His ignorance 
shallowness and weakness in argument would be ex- 
posed. His caricature, ridicule and clownish buffoon- 
ery would have to be repeated, until it would be as fiat 
as stale soda water. 

No one has ever made more or worse displays of 
ignorance. He asks "Do you believe that God passed 
by the Greeks and Romans with their wonderful civil- 
ization, and chose old Abraham and his ignorant 
tribes ?" The ignoramus did not know that Abraham 
lived a thousand years before Greeks or Romans were 
known. He declares that Moses lied when he spoke 
of Palestine as a "land flowing with milk and honey. " 
"A Chicago land agent would not dare to tell such a 



68 



1NGEBS0LL UNMASKED. 



lie. * 1 The ignoramus assumes that Palestine is now 
what it was in its best days under Israelite occupation. 
He is so ignorant that he does not know that man's 
abuse has rendered large portions of the best land on 
earth a barren waste. He never read the description 
of Palestine, by Strabo, the Greek traveller, or of 
Marcellius, the latin traveller, as they saw it about 
fifty years before Christ. He never read of the heavy 
tribute it paid to the Romans. He never read the 
descriptions that Josephus gives of its dense popula- 
tion wealth and great public works. The trouble 
with Ingersoll and most of the infidels is ' ignorance. 
Our Bob is nothing if he is not omnisciently scientific. 
In commenting on what he ridicules as the -■ 'Flood 
Story" in South Bend, Indiana, he gave to the world 
this marvelous scientific discovery, for no one else ever 
dreamed of it. x\ccording to the Bible the water was 
fifteen cubits above the tops of the highest mountains 
or about five miles and a half above the sea level. 
Since it grows colder as one ascends through the at- 
mosphere, so that if under the equator there is perpet- 
ual snow at the height of three miles, the water would 
have been frozen into solid ice three and a half miles 
deep under the equator. The block head did not have 
sense enough to see that if the surface of the ocean 
were five and a half miles further from the center of 
the earth, there would be precisely the same tempera- 
ture on that surface that there is now. In comment- 
ing on the poetic quotation from the book of 
Jasher mentioned in Joshua, he makes the astounding 
assertion that if the rotation of the earth on its axis 
were instantly stopped, there would generate as much 
heat as would be given off by six billion globes of 
solid coal the size of the earth. How it could gener- 
ate from the materials of the earth as much heat as 
one globe of solid coal the size of the earth, no one 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



ffl 



but an Ingersoll can see, much less as much heat as six 
billions of such globes. The greatest velocity of the 
earth's surface at the equator is about one thousand 
miles per hour. Trains running one hundred miles 
per hour have been stopped in the space of a few feet 
and the wheels were scarcely moved. 

Many things that IngersolFs admirers glorify as 
wonderfully witty and wise are idiotically silly. 
When asked how he could improve creation, in the 
present order of things, he replied, C T would make 
good health catching instead of disease. 5 ' His ad- 
mirers praise this as the wisest wittiest epigram ever 
uttered. Is it not idiotically silly? One does not 
have to catch what he already has. He catches that 
of which he is destitute. Ingersoll would create per- 
sons destitute of good health, or diseased that they 
might catch good health. Nearly ever one of his so 
called witticisms can be retorted the same way. That 
is one reason why Ingersoll dare not face in debate a 
well informed opponent. The writer will agree to re- 
tort his sneers and witticisms on him, and to beat his 
brains out with his own club. A knowledge that this 
would be done is the reason why Ingersoll has backed 
out of debate. There can not be found in one of his 
harangues a page of connected thought that is not 
stolen. There can not be found in one a fair truthful 
statement of what he assails. The prevailing features 
of his harangues are two ; a wonderful power of 
splurgy spread eagle word painting, and a wonderful 
power of clownish buffoonery. His chief weapons are 
ridicule, caricature, misrepresentation and falsehood. 
His wit is of the same low, lying, coarse blasphemous, 
obscene character as that of the clown, the buffoon 
and the street gamin. Those who roar over such, and 
think that religion must be a contemptible, ridiculous, 
absurd thing, because it can be so ridiculed by carica- 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED, 



ture through falsehood, forget that it is the most sa- 
cred things that are most easily ridiculed. It is but 
one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and all 
you have to do to take that step is to lie. Caricature 
the sublime by falsehood and you make it ridiculous. 
The holy passion of love between the sexes is the 
theme of much ribaldry, vile jests and stories, over 
which vile human nature laughs and roars. The love 
of mother for her child, the modesty of the pure, the 
feebleness of the hoary head, whose gray hairs are in 
the eyes o£ the descent, a crown of honor, are especi- - 
ally the themes of caricature ridicule and the brutal 
jests. 

Ingersoll can in bar rooms, grogshops, low crowds 
and law places of vile resort, ridicule by caricature 
through falsehood the love of man and woman, and 
all the holiest feelings of our nature, just as he ridi- 
cules by caricature through falsehood, the sacred 
things of religion, while ruffians as low 7 as himself roar 
and laugh. Shall we therefore conclude that they are 
absurd and contemptible ? Shall we gather in crowds 
and laugh and roar over such ribaldry, and be rec- 
reant to love for woman, or respect for parents, be- 
cause he can by caricature through falsehood, ridicule 
them, in brutal ribaldry ? In like manner he can 
siand on the rostrum, if he is paid for it, just as. Dan 
.Rice acts the clown for pay, and by caricature through 
falsehood, ridicule in blasphemous ribaldry, the love 
of man for God; while a crowd as low as himself roars 
and laugh over such profane, buffoonery. Shall we 
abandon religion because of such ruffianism ? Let us 
remember that the most sacred things are most easily 
ridiculed, All truth, all science can be caricatured and 
ridiculed as he ridicules religion. Shall we abandon 
all science, all truth ? Those that fancy that by his 
laughter of fools, that is like the crackling of thorns 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



71 



binder a pot, he has overturned religion, do not know 
-die difference between buffoonery and argument. 
Ridicule is the most contemptible of all weapons, and 
%he most easily wielded against the sacred and vener- 
able, for ribaldry has to take but one step, by carica- 
ture through falsehood from the sacred to the ridicu- 
lous, and that step Ingersoll always takes in his buffoon 
ridicule of religion, and gaping crowds, as low as him- 
self laugh and roar as on the slack rope of his lying 
imagination, he performs his feats of ground and lofty 
tumbling. He is the clown of religious controversy, 
the Dan Rice, at whose gags the pit laughs and roars. 
A blackguard with a scavenger's cart of filth can hid- 
eously besmear our great national capitol in Washing- 
ton. Can he erect a similar building out of such ma- 
terial ? Ingersoll can besmear the temple of religion 
with his scavenger cart of abuse. But can he erect 
the matchless temple of reason, for all humanity of 
-which he boasts, out of such material ? Xo ability is 
required to destroy. An idiot with a match that does 
mot cost the hundreth part of a cent, can in a mo- 
ments time start a fire in London that will destroy 
mhat it has taken millions, and ages to erect. But can he 
replace what he has destroyed ? Ingersoll ma)' de- 
stroy the faith of humanity by his buffoonery, but can 
lie replace it ? His work is negative, not affirmative, 
.destructive not constructive. It is destruction of 
what does not like, restraint of sin, punishment of sin, 
iaad construction of nothing. Says, Dr. Wendle. him- 
self an infidel lecturer: "One looks through Inger- 
soll' s harangues in vain, to find that- he recognizes any 
•evil except religion, any sin except belief of religion. 
That any sin should be punished, except the unpar- 
donable sin of believing Christianity. When does he 
•Tax eloquent, when does his rage burst forth? When- 
ever he conceives the thought that sin and evil should 



"2 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



be punished, or the idea of a hell of punishment for 
sin." His harangues are the frothings of rage at 
the idea of restraint and rebellion against all idea of 
punishment for sin. 

IngersolPs admirers have objected to the writer's 
statement, that Ingersoll is uneducated, and a man oF 
no reading, knowledge or erudition. The objection is 
that it can not be true-, for he is such an eloqueiit 
speaker. The most eloquent speech ever made on the 
American continent, was made by Logan the Mingo 
Chieftain, who did not know one letter from another^ 
President W. H. Harrison declared that a speech made 
before him when Governor of Indiana, by Tecumseli. 
the Shawnee Chieftain, who did not know one letter 
from another, was the most eloquent and the ablest 
legal argument that he ever heard. Eloquence is not: 
education and scholarship. Gift of God is not learn- 
ing, knowledge, erudition. No education is needed 1 o 
get off the mixture of spread eagle splurgy and ridicule 
in which Ingersoll indulges. 

A leading Free Thinker and Republican declared 
in one of the leadingfmagazines of the century: 4 ''In- 
gersoll has injured Free Thought and the Republican 
party by his coarseness and abuse." Prominent Re- 
publicans of Indiana and Illinois have repeatedly de- 
clared that his abuse has driven away more votes than: 
it ever made. He began a speech in Pike's Opera- 
House, Cincinnati, Ohio: "Show me a drunkard^ 
and I will show you a Democrat. Show me a traitor 
and I will show you a Democrat. Show me a man 
that whips his wife and I will show }^ou a Democrat. !i> 
Dr. Wallace of Indiana openly declared that Inger- 
solPs speeches lost him votes in his precinct. It is to 
be hoped that the Republican party will cease to insult 
the American people by sending out Ingersoll as st 
campaign speaker. Believers of the Bible in the Re- 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



73 



publican party are insulted, when tbey are misrepres- 
ented by Ingersoll's being sent out as an advocate of 
their views. Do they want the odium of his blasphe- 
mous harangues fastened on to the party ? A man 
who will roar: 1 'I stopped reading the Bible, becau-e 
I am so much better than the God of the Bible, that I 
do not want to be corrupted by such company. D — n 
such a God. D — n such a Bible. D — n anybody who 
w 7 ill not damn such a God and such a Bible," should 
never be sent forth to misrepresent decent men and 
christians. Even Hanna's fund was disgraced, when 
Ingersoll was hired by it. As a specimen of his lying 
misrepresentation, we call attention to a statement in 
his "God's." "No pagan deity ever commanded one 
of his generals to rip up pregnant women." Before 
reviewing the "Gods" in IngersolPs presence in the 
Opera House in Peoria, April 6th 1872, the writer had 
a friend inquire, "To what passage did Ingersoll refer 
in the language ?" He was told II Kings S — 12. If 
the reader will read the passage carefully, especially 
verses 7-12, he will see that Ben Hadad the King of 
Syria was sick and sent Hazael, his general to Elisha 
to inquire if he v^ould recover. After answering the 
question, Elisha burst out w T eeping. Amazed Hazael 
exclaimed, what ails my Eord ? Why does my Lord 
weep? Elisha replied: "Because of the evil that 
thou wilt do the children of Israel. You will burn 
their strongholds with fire. You will slay their young 
men with the sword. You will dash out the brains of 
their young children. You will rip up their women 
that are with child." This lying scoundrel deliber- 
ately falsifies a prophecy in which the prophet of God 
foretold with such abhorrence, that he wept over it, 
what a pagan king would do to Israelite women, into 
a command of Jehovah to an Israelite general, to per- 
petrate the outrage on pagan women. In those nine 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



words Ingersoll told tour as deliberate, wholesale lies, 
as were ever uttered in human speech. Ap^il 6th, 
1S72, the writer in Ingersoll' s presence exposed these 
infamous lies, and now after twenty-seven years they 
are still in his ''Gods." This is only one of the many 
such misrepresentations and lies. 

"Well he draws great crowds, larger crowds than 
any preacher." So do Black Crook and profane and 
obscene farces, and for the same reason. Thousands 
will flock to see a monstrosity, a two-headed calf, a 
six-legged pig, and only a score will go to see a master- 
piece of painting or sculpture. Emerson will draw a 
hundred to a free lecture, and Ingersoll a thousand at 
a dollar a head. A few will go to hear Edwin Booth's 
grand personations of Hamlet, and the same building 
will be packed from pit to dome, to see and hear Black 
Crook. "And he gets $500 per night. What do 
jpreachers get ?" Frances Willard thought herself 
unusually successful, if she got $5000 per year for as 
grand work as was ever done for humanity, in which 
she used nearly all she received. Sarah Benhardt, the 
French strumpet, received $5000 per night, for her 
demoralizing personations of immortality. If amounts 
of money received is the measure of greatness, Sarah 
is ten times a* great as Bob. Dan Rice used to be 
paid more for his buffoonery as clown, than Ingersoll 
was ever paid for his buffoonery as the clown of reli- 
gious controversy, — the Dan Rice of the lecture ros- 
trum. A young man once in the writer's presence 
retorted that all admirers of Ingersoll, boasts of how 
much he gets : "Decent women receive for decent 
employment from six to ten dollars per month. In- 
mates of gilded palaces of infamy receive more per 
night." It is a sad reflection on human nature, that 
such are the facts, but they are undeniable. Inger- 
soll draws crowds and gets his pay just as Black Crook, 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



75 



Sarah Benhart and Dan Rice drew big crowds, and 
got big pay, and the same class of persons flocked and 
paid in both cases. Infidels love to sneer at preachers 
as mercenary. ' 'They preach for the collection. " In- 
gersoll is constantly getting off such stuff. The writer 
heard him say, u No hell, no collection. No collect- 
ion, no preaching.'' Let us make a few comparisons. 
There are in the United States 100,000 persons 
engaging preaching and 100.000 more who do more or 
less preacher's work. They deliver to the people of 
the United States over 20.000,000 discourses and lect- 
ures each year. If each lecture cost what we are told 
Ingersoli receives, the people of the United States 
would pay over §5,000.000,000 per year for preaching. 
And Ingersoli sneers at preachers as mercenaiy. For 
years Ingersoli was President of the ''American Lib- 
eral League" of United States and Canada. It was 
customary to have him lecture at annual conventions 
of the league and charge admission to meet expenses 
of the convention, This did not suit this self-sacrific- 
ing apostle of humanity. In 1885 he was not present. 
By dispatch and letter he was induced to be present on 
Sunday and lecture Sunday night. As an admission 
could not be charged on Sunday, a collection was 
taken. Ingersoli pocketed the collection and skipped 
on the first train. The "Secular Age/' the infidel 
paper in Cleveland, Ohio, where the convention was 
held, published the facts and branded Ingersoli as a 
hoggish thief, who stole the collection. And Ingerr 
soil sneers at preachers for being mercenary, and 
preaching for collections. They do not steal collec- 
tions taken up for other purposes. 

Charles Roberts, one of the owners of the "Chris- 
Man Evangelist" in St. Louis, when writing in the of- 
fice of Lincoln and Amour in Chicago heard Lincoln 
ask Ingersoli why he persisted in delivering Infidel 



76 



IXGEESOLL UNMASKED. 



harangues, when it ruined him politically and as a law- 
yer. He replied with an oath, "It pays. There is 
easily ten times as much money in it as in law and 
politics both." This gives the explanation of his zeal 
for infidelity. He is in it for revenue. He will not 
open his mouth, unless he expects to get as much per 
night, as the average salary paid for a year's preach- 
ing. And he sneers at preachers for being mercenary, 
and preaching for collections. He is utterly dishon- 
est in his assaults on religion. As he stood by his 
father's grave in the cemetery in Peoria, he said to the 
preacher who had preached the funeral discourse: "I 
thank you Mr. Stevens, for what you said in praise of 
my good Christian father. He was a christian soldier 
and hero, and is now with Paul and those whose lives 
he emulated in his life/' When did he lie ? In this 
statement over his father's grave, or when he is lying 
against Christianity for 5500 per night ? When de- 
fending Dorsey, the Star Route thief, for half of the 
swag that Dorsey stole from the nation, Ingersoll 
closed his appeal before the jury with a rhapsody over 
woman's devotion, using the scene at the crucifixion, 
and moved all to tears in describing the scene. The 
next moment he would have gone on to the rostrum 
and for S500 have ridiculed and blasphemed the entire 
scene. His infidelity has two motives. Fear of pun- 
ishment and hatred of restraint, and love of money, 
' 'Well he is popular, he has lots of friends. He was 
and is popular in Peoria. He is benevolent and liberal. 
He loves his family. In short, he is a first rate good 
clever fellow,'' He is popular in the low sense in 
which all such persons are popular, in the hail-fellow- 
well-met-with-every-body style of "the first rate good 
clever fellow." Of all worthless unreliable good for 
nothing characters "the first rate good clever fellow''' 
is the most worthless and contemptible. It is a popu— 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



77 



larity without respect and esteem, a popularity that is 
a condemnation of the life and character of the person. 
Ingersoll is popular with the reckless, the fast, the in- 
different, the low and the lewd. He is of the class 
who will slap you on the back and roar out: ''Old 
fellow, how are you G — d d — n you ?' ' 

He never was respected by the decent people of 
Peoria, nor popular with them. His followers were 
the habitues of distilleries, grogshops and places of low 
and vile resort. He was the mouthpiece of such. 
Peoria used to speak of him about like she would of 
Bob Fitzsimmons or any other person of such notoriety. 
Some years ago he moved to Washington. He was no 
longer Peoria's notoriety. In 1879 he visited Peoria. 
The city was billed all over, that the illustrious ex- 
citizen w^ould lecture in the Opera House. After the 
lecture to a house not half filled, Ingersoll growled; 
"It is a d — d beggarly crowd. A set > of d — d flat- 
heads." They come from Ingersoll* s former places of 
loafing. He was no longer Peoria's notoriety, and 
there was no respect for him, sufficient to gather an 
audience. He played out years ago in politics, and as 
a lecturer. Lately he has tried to regain his former 
notoriety, but has failed. His admirers often listen- 
ing to him, say that he has "lost his grip. He is 
played out." The trouble is that he has tried to avoid 
his great faults, abuse, ridicule, low jokes and yarns, 
caricature and falsehood. He has tried to get 
discourses w r orthy to be called ''lectures." And his 
his lectures are much superior in style and manner, as 
literary productions to any of his former lectures. But 
as a toper who had called for a dram would be disgust- 
ed if pure w T ater were handed to him, instead of the 
drugged dose of "foity-rod' ' that he craved, so Inger- 
soll' s admirers are disappointed when he tries to give 
them a decent lecture instead of the old farrago of lies. 



78 



IE GERSOLL UNMASKED. 



ridicule, buffoonery and blasphemy, over which tbey 
love to roar. 

He loves his family in animal -like indifferent style 
just as his father loved his family and that ruined his 
family. He is liberal to his family and others when 
it cost no effort, no self denial and no self sacrifice. 
For years he deliberate!}' sponged his living off his 
over-burdened father, and did not love him in a decent 
rational, honorable style, that would lead to labor and 
self-denial to help him. By his connection with the 
whisky-ring, his defense of the Star Route theives, his 
lectures and his work as the tool of rings and trusts in 
law and politics, he has obtained easily large sums of 
money and living has cost him no self-sacrifice. It looks 
suspicious that he gives so ostentatiously. He gave 
five thousand dollars one fall to yellow feaver sufferers 
just before he started out on a lecturing campaign. 
He gave five thousand dollars another fall to grass- 
hopper sufferers, just as he was starting out on a lect- 
ure campaign. In each case he received advertising 
by the act that would have cost him many times what 
he gave. It was simply the crafty stroke of a business- 
like shrewd, advertising dodger and he made it all 
back in increased lecture fees in a few nights. 

He can leave his pocket book open when full of 
what cost him little effort and no self denial, or self 
sacrifice. It cost no self-denial, no self sacrifice to do, 
and is a selfish gratification. But if it cost him self- 
denial and sore self-sacrifice, his pocket book would 
not be so free. There are preachers who are compared 
to him; with sneers and disparagement, and that he 
sneers at, who are his equals in ability, and his super- 
iors in education, that have given up all ambition at 
the dictate of love for their fellow men, for a calling 
in which they do not receive as much per year for 
wasting toil and self sacrifice, for the good of others, , 



[NGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



as Ingersoll does for one night's easy buffoonery. 
They practice more self denial, show more love for 
their families in one hour in self sacrifee, than he does 
in years. They go poorly clad and poorly fed, 
that they may feed, educate and clothe their families. 
Ingersoir s selfish animal-like feelings sinks infinitely 
below such self sacrificing love. 

"He is broad minded and liberal." He mistakes 
licence for freedom, lawless rebellion against all re- 
strain for liberty. There never lived a more narrow 
minded intolerant bigot in regard to all that he dislikes 
and opposes, than this boasted apostle of ''Free 
Thought." Though he assails the declaration of Jes- 
us: "He that believes and is baptized shall be saved, 
and he that disbelieves shall be condemned," Mark 16: 
16; no one preaches that idea more incessantly and re- 
lentlessly than himself. The burden of his clamor is 
"He that believes the glorious gospel of 'Free Thought- 
shall be saved, but he that believes that pernicious su- 
perstition, Christianity, shall be damned with all the 
curses of such superstition." We have already ex- 
posed his evil influence exerted in fanning the flames 
of vice, lust and lawlessness. One looks in vaiir 
through his harangues for the idea that anything is 
wrong except to believe the Bible, for any denunciation 
of wrong, except the misconduct of Christians, or for 
the idea that any sins should be punished, except the 
sins of Christians. On the contrary every harangue 
teems with the idea that punishment for sin and re- 
straint of wrong doing is tyranny. I can take any of 
his harangues and the letter of Raude, the Illinois cm- 
threat to the "Chicago Times.' written with his pen 
dripping with the blood of twelve victims slain in cold 
blood, and take out of the language of Ingersoll's ti- 
rades God' 'hell' "punishment' and insert instead !g< 
eminent,' 'law' 'officer of law' and 'jail,' and iu 



8G 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



Rand's letter you have Bob Ingersollism gone to seed. 
Rande rants against human government and law. 
When Rande roared out at the ministers who called on 
him in jail, 'Go away G — d d — n you. I don't want 
any of }our G — d d — d nonsense. I am a Bob Inger- 
soli man, * every one believed him. He was the refined 
fruit of Bob Ingersollism. Had he said, "1 am a Chris- 
tian, every one would have said that he was a shame- 
less liar. When Rande abandoned a decent life he 
abandoned Christianity and took up Ingersollism, as 
the rule of his life. When Jerry McCauley and John 
Newton aboned a life of crime, each took up chritsian- 
ity and became a blessing to the race. When Rande' s 
grip was broken open, it w r as not stuffed with Bibles, 
but with Ingersoir s harangues. Men read his harangues 
to deaden conscience and encourage them to sin. They 
never read the Bible for such purpose. If Moody visits 
a city, and all accept his teaching, they know they must 
abandon sin and live righteous lives. This is known to 
be the only legitimate result of living the Christ-life. 
But if Ingersoll visits a city, nine-tenths, at least, of 
his admirers are among the fast, the reckless, and often 
the villians. When men accept his teaching they do 
not expect to abandon sin, There is nothing in his 
harangues to move them to do so. They persist in sin, 
and accept Ingersollism as a refuge when they launch 
out into sin. If men that have been good accept 
Ingersollism and launch out into sin, no one sees any 
in consistency in doing so. On the contrary the}' look on 
it as just what was to be expected. If a man accept' s 
Moody's teaching, no one for one moment, even dreams 
of his becoming vicious as a result of it. If he were 
to do so, every one would say that his vicious course 
was a violation of every principle that he had accept- 
ed, and would regard an assertion that what he had ac- 



INGKERSOLL UNMASKED. 



cepted had caused him to sin, as an insult to their goocL 
sense. 

Irgersoll loves to make comparisons. He com- 
pares the Judases, the Benedict Arnolds of Christianity, 
the hypocrites, the traitors to Christianity, with infidels 
made what they are by the influence of Christianity, 
with only about one decent infidel in a thousand. Why 
does he not compare a Martyn, a judson, a Campbell or 
Spurgeon with an Ingersoll? Every one can see that. 
Martyn, judson, Campbell and Spurgeon with 
their noble character and heroic self-sacrifice, and the 
countless thousands of such men and women, are the 
legitimate fruits, of Christianity, — the fruits of Christ 
life. That the life, career and character of Ingersoll, 
as we have portrayed and proven in this book, are the 
legitimate fruits of a system, preached by a self-ag- 
grandizing missionary, who revels in every gratifica- 
tion, and sacrifices himself in taking five hundred 
dollars per night! If infidelity is satisfied with a 
Hobbes, a Burlingbroke a Hume, a Rosseau, a Vol- 
taire, a Paine, and an Ingersoll Christianity can be 
satisfied with a Judson, a Martyn, a Wesley, a How- 
ard, a Wilbeforce, an Oberlin, a Miller, a Campbell 
and a Spurgeon. Christianity aiso can compare her 
colleges, her hospitals, her asylums, her artistic 
churches, her countless educational, benevolent and 
reformatory institutions, that girdle the globe, her mil- 
lions spent each year for the redemption of humanity, 
with the saloons, the beer gardens, the lecture rooms 
and the halls of infidelity. "A tree is known by 
its fruit." Matt. 7:20. 

Inclosing this chapter on Ingersoll, I will add 
that for pure and unadulterated villainy, debauchery 
and prevariacation, he has had no equal unless per- 
chance in the life and character of Samuel P. Putnam 
and M. E. Billings. 



82 



INGEESOLL UNMASKED. 



The infamous Billings published a pamphlet of 
lies entitled ' ' Crimes of Preachers' * and then wound up 
his vile career in the penitentiary. 

Putnam, for years the President of the "Ameri- 
can Secular Union," the leading infidel organization 
of the world, was exposed by infidel H. L. Green in 
his ''Free Thought Magazine/ 5 at Chicago, in January 
1897. Also, Mr. Harry Hoover of Allegheny City, 
Pa. , an infidel of some culture and ability, laid bare 
the facts in his life by the following excoriation print- 
ed in the Blue Grass Blade, an infidel scavenger sheet, 
at Lexington, Ky., Jan. 17, 1897. Hoover says: 

I have known Samuel P. Putnam for twenty-three years 
I encouraged him to east off the Unitarian shell, and* paid 
him the first money he ever earned in the free- thought field. 
F01 fifteen years I was his friend, and the seven lectures he 
delivered in Pittsburg were arranged for by me. Blinded by 
his genius, I could not and would not see his faults. I de- 
fended him, and believed him innocent ; but the time came 
(in 1887) when mv eves were opened and I saw his ''other- 
self." 

If there ever was a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," S. P. 
Putnam was that man. To the pen of a Thomas Moore he 
added the tongue of a Patrick Henry and an enthusiasm and 
magnetism that were irresistible, and yet under the smooth 
exterior were nurtured passions, that it would be an insult to 
animals to call "brutal." The nightingale, the fox, the 
swine, the goat, the bloodhound, and the Tasmanian devil 
were all represented in this man. His licentiousness, dis- 
simulation, and tenacity of purpose ; his selfishness and en- 
durance under dissipation, were something phenomenal. In 
all my acquaintance among liberals, during thirty years I 
never met but one more unprincipled man, who had cared 
less for his intrigues, which he pursued with a tenacity, 
finesse, and success of Aaron Burr. 

Putnam was a "Free Lover," divorced from his- 
wife for adultery. In September, 1883, he registered 
at a hotel in Salamanca, N. Y., with a prostitute, as 
' 'Samuel P. Mansfield and wife." In January, 1897, 
he and a young woman were found dead in the samer 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



83 



room at 47 Botolph Street in Boston, a sporting place, 
"known far and wide as the he'adquarters of free 
lovers in Boston," so says infidel H. L. Green of Chi- 
cago. 

If he were not such an egotistic braggadocio, the 
name of the atheistic ex-convict, Charles Cucumber 
Moore, of Kentucky, should appear here in company 
with his elite (?) brethren. The leading infidel jour- 
nals of the world have been loud in their praises of 
Putnam, Billings, Ingersoll, Moore and such cattle, all 
the legitimate fruits of Infidelity. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED, 



INGERSOLL' S COWARDICE. 

For nearly thirty years it has been the incessant 
boast of Ingersoll's admirers that believers in the 
Bible dare not meet him in debate, and that he has 
backed out the preachers of Christendom. It has been 
asserted that he has met and defeated in debate, G. 
R. Wendling, Fathei Lambert and the writer of this 
book. He has written replies to the criticisms of 
Gladstone, Dr. Fields and others, but has never held 
a debate with any one. He entered into contract for 
a written debate with Judge J. S. Black, to be publish- 
ed in "The North American Review." The positive 
contract of Ingersoll and Rice, editor of the Review, 
was that Black's reply in every instance was to be 
published in the same number with Ingersoll's attack 
on religion. Black's first reply was so crushing that 
Ingersoll and Rice violated the contract and published 
Ingersoll's second article without Black's reply, against 
Black's emphatic protest. Ingersoll refused to allow 
Black's reply to appear in the same number of the 
Review with his attack, violating a positive contract, 
and Black indignantly dropped the coward and dis- 
honest covenant breaker. 

The w r riter reviewed Ingersoll's ''Gods," April 
1872, in the Opera House, in Peoria in Ingersoll's 
presence. Learning that Ingersoll was intending to 
get up when he was done and get off a lot of buffoon- 
ery, the writer challenged him to an honorable, order- 
ly debate of twelve nights, and Ingersoll backed out. 
In the office of Colonel Wright, Havana, 111., in the 
presence of J. C. Brooks of Good Hope, 111., Ingersoll 
said: "I am not such a G — d d — n fool as to place 
myself on the platform for a twelve nights debate 
with that fellow. Why d--n it he would wear me out.'* 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



85 



In that declaration Ingersoll confessed the truth and 
the real reason why he would rot debate. 

In August, 1877, infidels in Canton, 111., chal- 
lenged the Ministerial Association of Canton to have a 
debate between the writer and Ingersoll and the chal- 
lenge was accepted. A Committee of infidels visited 
Ingersoll. The chairman of the committee said to 
Rev. J. H. Berry, ''Ingersoll is a cowardly sneak. 
When we told him what we had done he flew into a 
rage and cursed us, saying that he "hoped his friends 
would stop making G — d d — 11 fools of themselves, 
trying to get up debates between him and Clark 
Braden, for he is not a debater, but a lecturer/' In 
the winter of 1878, the infidels of Good Hope and 
Bushnell, Illinois, challenged the ministers to have a 
debate in Bushnell between Ingersoll and the writer. 
The challenge was accepted, and Rev. Alexander 
reported to the writer that Ingersoll backed out. As 
this was several years before the publication of 
* 'Ingersoll Unmasked" that was not the reason 
for the refusal. Ingersoll gave the true reason, 
he dare not debate. As the Ministerial Association 
offered to give at least tenfold the endorsement Inger- 
soll could get, lack of endorsement was not the reason. 

In February 1899 Rev. G. F. Hall, pastor of the 
T abernacle Congregation of the Church of Christ in 
D ecatur Illinois one of the largest congregations in the 
state, wrote to the author inquiring if he would meet 
in pubi c debate in Decatur, Ingersoll who was soon to 
lecture in Decatur. The writer furnished to Mr. Hall 
the data for an open letter to Ingersoll, which was 
published in a Decatur paper and marked copies of the 
paper (see introduction to this book), mailed to over 
two hundred leading papers in the United States and 
-Canada — to all having a circulation of over four thou- 
sand, and to many religious periodicals. In the article 



allv challenged and defied to a twelve nights diseus- 



that churcr 



dbrsementf The article asked Ingersoll m 



mtdr am 



it, or com- 
ska, Illinois. 



)pera House 
ident of the 
Indianapolis, 



with Rev. Aaron Walker, one of the ablest ministers 
in the state, and again he backed out. 

Before a large audience in Peoria, Rabbi Brown, 
one of the leading Israelite divines in the United 
States most pointedly challenged Ingersoll to debate 
and afterwards told Ingersoll to his face, in a com- 
pany of prominent men, that he was a cowardly charla- 
tan that did not dare debate and Ingersoll took it, 
laid down under it like a cowardly whipped ctsr^ 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



87 



When he was in Great Britain, Rev. Gregg a promi- 
nent Presbyterian preacher of Great Britain challenged 
him to debate and he backed out. Rev. Z. T. Sweeney 
one of the leading Christian preachers in Indiana, 
pastor of one of the largest congregations in the State, 
with the cooperation of one of the ministers of Colum- 
bus, Indiana, challenged Ingersoll in the most pointed 
manner through the press to debate with the Rev. J. S. 
Sweeney, one of the leading preachers of the United 
States and he backed out. 

Col. A. B. McGruder one of the leading lawyers 
in Virginia, in the columns of the papers of Richmond 
Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia most pointed- 
edly challenged Ingersoll to debate and he backed out. 
Rev. C. Brooks, pastor of the Christian Church in 
Paris, Illinois, one of the largest congregations in the 
state, at the close of a lecture by Ingersoll in the Or era 
House, in Paris, before a large audience pointedly 
challenged Ingersoll to debate offering to pay him in 
advance five hundred dollars for each night's debate, 
and Ingersoll backed out. All of these facts are no- 
torious. Neither Ingersoll nor his admirers dare deny 
them. When one considers the standing of the per- 
sons selected to meet Ingersoll, and the endorsements 
they could furnish, endorsements that Ingersoll can 
not begin to furnish, all pretence that they were not 
worthy of notice, is an insult to all sense and decency, 
and no one with any regard for sense of truth would 
liint such an excuse. The truth is that Ingersoll is a 
shallow spouter, whose entire stock in trade, except 
what he has stolen, is splurgy spiead eagle and lying 
buffoonery and ridicule by lying caricature and mis- 
representation, who has not a common school educa- 
tion, and but little reading and information. He dare 
not plant himself before such an audience as such a 
debate would call together, and face a representative- 



388 



IXGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



*of the Bible" for twelve nights. He knows that his 
Hack of education, scholarship, information, knowledge 
Hiis shallowness and utter lack of argument would be 
^exposed. His splurges and jokes w r ould have to be 
rreh ashed, until they would be as stale as stale soda 
-water. He confessed the reason why he does not de- 
ifoate. "Iam not such a G — d d — d fool as to place 
rtnyself upon a platform for a twelve nights debate. 
~Why d — n it, he would wear me out." This strips 
'this infidel jackdaw 7 of the plumage with which his ad- 
mirers have bedecked him by shameless lying, and 
leaves him in his contemptible jackdaw 7 proportions. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



A CHALLENGE TO AN INVESTIGATION. 



The first edition of "Ingersoll Unmasked" was 
published in 1881. Infidel papers howled for Inger- 
soll to have the writer arrested for criminal libel. The 
Christian Advocate and. The Methodist, of New York, and. 
The Christian Advocate of San Francisco, in editorials 
marked and sent to Ingersoll challenged him to have 
the writer arrested and put to proof in court, of his 
charges, or to reply to him in their columns, offering- 
him ample space. Eighteen years have elapsed (for I 
am writing in 1899) and over fifty thousand copies of 
the pamphlet have been circulated and extracts from it 
have been published in thousands of papers and re- 
peated hundreds of thousands of times in sermons and 
lectures. Ingersoll' s sole reply has been blasphemous 
abuse in private communication, when compelled to 
speak of the matter by inquiries of others. The posi- 
tion of the author in his church, one of the leading or- 
ganizations in the United States, as preacher, teacher,, 
writer, lecturer and debater, and in the religious and 
literary world, is such, that the assertion that his 
statements are not w r orthty of notice is simply idotical- 
ly absurd. The fact that everything that could be 
assailed in any statement in the pamphlet has been in- 
stantly and eagerly assailed, shows that the rest 
would be assailed, if the statements could be disproved. 
The truth is that Ingersoll knows that every state- 
ment can be proved, and that a suit or an investiga- 
tion would result, not only in proving what has been 
published, but that the agitation would bring to light 
much more which has not been published. He does 
not want to have reporters on his track investigating 
his life. 

In the winter of 1882 the first edition of the 
pamphlet was published in l% The Star }} of Madison. 



90 



IKGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



Indiana. This led to a controversy in The Star between 
the author and Mayor Gordon of Indianapolis, a Mr. 
Hay of Madison and John Warner, Mayor of Peoria. 
The writer challenged his assailants to the most thor- 
ough searching investigation before a mutually chosen 
committee. Suddenly Ingersoll's defenders dropped 
the entire matter, at the demand of Ingersoll, so the 
editor of the paper, the Rev. J. Q. Wright, now chap- 
lain in the United States Navy, wrote to the author. 

In 1 886, Prof. J. K. Bayne, principal of St- Clair 
Oraded School, Pittsburg, Penn., made an arrange- 
ment with the Secular Union of Pittsburg for an in- 
vestigation before a mutually chosen committee of 
the charges that Ingersoll had stolen his 1 'Mistakes of 
Moses" from James Hittell. 

When the Secular Union wrote to Ingersoll, they 
dropped the investigation. In 1889 the statements of 
the writer were assailed by the editor of the "Peoria 
Transcript," The writer sent to the "Transcript" a 
list of over seventy charges, numbered, and clear, posi- 
tive and definite, giving time and place, challeng- 
ing the editor to publish them, and to put him to the 
proof, pledging himself to furnish proof for every 
statement categorically and specifically denied; and de- 
fying the editor to publish it. The editor had been in 
Peoria only a short time. Ingersoll had not lived in 
Peoria for nearly twenty years. The editor had heard 
from Ingersoll's admirers, who were his principal- ac- 
quaintances and associates in Peoria, to most glowing 
eulogies of Ingersoll. Believing what he had heard, 
he concluded, that of course the most crushing demoli- 
tion he could inflict on the writer would be to publish 
the absurd charges of the writer, that every one in 
Peoria would know to be baseless, and fabricated out of 
whole cloth, so he published them. To his amaze- 
ment Ingersoll and his admirers were furiously enraged 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



91 



The publication of the charges brought out not only 
a crushing confirmation of them, but the agitation 
brought out scores of other facts as damaging. At 
the demand of Ingersoll and his admirers the editor 
backed out, broke his promise and closed his columns 
to all further agitation of the matter. 

In 1 89 1 in Monte Vista, Colorado, the statements 
of the writer against Ingersoll were denied by the In- 
fidel League. The writer defied them to an investiga- 
tion before a mutually chosen committee. Gen. Sick- 
les of Colorado and others, agreed to such investigation 
and after writing to Ingersoll, ceased all correspond- 
ence. Though Ingersoll said not one word in his 
lecture in Decatur, nor in the papers in regard to the 
challenge and charges made by Mr. Hall, he asserted 
to a reporter of the Indianapolis News that he had com- 
pletely refuted every one of them, and that he would 
give any one $5,000 to convict him of plagiarism. Mr. 
Hall promptly published to the News a challenge to 
Ingersoll to face an investigation. Ingersoll' s offer 
-was merely a shallow bluff. If a million were to con- 
vict him of hundreds of acts of plagiarism, there was 
not the slightest assurance that one would get a cent 
of the $5000. He proposed that Ingersoll choose one 
good lawyer, he would another, and these a third. 
Then let Ingersoll place $5000 under the unrestricted 
control of that committee, and meet him before the 
committe, and his money will be properly taken care 
of. Though marked copies of the paper were sent to 
Ingersoll, at his residence and several other places, he 
has been as silent as the grave. 

Some years ago Rev. A. C. Dixon, a well known 
preacher of New T York City, used in a sermon pub- 
lished in the papers of the city, some of the authors 
charges. Thinking that Rev. Dixon would not know 
where and how to find proof for his statements, Inger- 



£2 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



soil sued him for slander. The writer gave to Mr. 
Dixon the names of witnesses and the authorities to 
obtain. When notice was served on Ingersoll' s attor- 
neys of the evidence that would be presented, seeing^ 
that Mr. Dixon was, to use a western expression, 
"healed," Ingersoll paid the costs and withdrew the 
suit. By this action, by stopping all investigation, 
Ingersoll has in the most palpable manner possible 
plead guilty. The writer has been called upon by in- 
fidel papers, infidels and others, for affidavits from the 
persons whose testimony he quotes. Let Ingersoll or 
his admirers, make such demand in court, or before a 
mutually chosen committee. It is his business to do 
so. It is none of the business of any other person. 
Until Ingersoll dees this, and so long as by silence he 
confesses guilt, all such demands on the writer, are 
simply impudent intermeddling of persons not con- 
cerned and will be treated as such. 

The writer would suggest that Ingersoll's admir- 
ers should cease their lying adulation of Ingersoll, un- 
til he disproves these charges. That believers of the 
Bible forever cease betraying the truth, and giving; 
to Ingersoll the greatest power that can be given to 
him, to injure the truth, by conceding to him a char- 
acter of which these charges prove that he is utterly 
unworthy. That believers of the Bible forever cease 
their silly squeamishness in regard to telling the truth 
in regard to this unscrupulous unprincipled enemy of 
truth. That by publishing the facts in regard to him 
they strip him of all power to injure the truth. 

The writer will close with some extracts. Rev. 
B. W. Johnson, once President of Eureka College 
Eureka, Illinois, editor of the Christian Evangelist, 
and author of several works, and one of the most hon- 
ored preachers of the Christian Church in an editorial 
in the Christian Evangelist said: 



INGER SOLL UNM AS KED. 



93 



"In their anxiety to be fair, religious papers may go so 
tar as to injure the cause they cherish, and of which they are 
the special defenders. We do not know that lngersoll has 
pursued such a course, that they are bound to spring to his 
defense when a false charge is made against him. Such 
•charges are published every day against public men. that the 
religious papers pass by in silence. They do not seem to 
have concerned themselves about the charges ot peculation 
against Senator Sherman, or of plagiarism against Dr. Lari- 
mer. Yet when a pamphlet makes the least charges against 
lngersoll. a considerable portion of the religious press have 

* opened their columns to refute the charge. Such a course 
would seem to imply that lngersoll s reputation is very dear 
(to them), or that he has laid the religious world under sig- 
nal obligations, or that he has been fully outraged by cal- 
umny. We do not assert that ail the statements made about 
lngersoll are true. Indeed, it is a matter that does not 
concern us. We do, however, question the propriety of 
religious papers singling out a blasphemous infidel, from a 
hundred public men who may have been falsely accused, 
. and making themselves special champions to rigiit his sup- 
posed wrongs. Such a course is calculated to produce sym- 
pathy for him, give him a credit to which he is not entitled, 
and secure for him a respectful hearing in his crusade against 
all that is holy. What lias lngersoll done that he deserves 
such distinguished treatment ? It is a matter of notoriety 
in all the parts of Illinois that were his haunts until within 
a few years, a matter of which we do not speak by hearsay, 
that he was distinguished, in every profane circle, as a leader 
in obscenity and blasphemy. It has been our lot to be 
thrown where we were compelled to listen to his filth and 
profanity, which ran like a never failing river of filth, to the 
delight of a roaring crowd. To make a low joke on the name 
or life of our Lord, was his special delight. In those day> l>e- 

b fore he aspired to the position of a champion assailant of 
Christianity, no one ever alluded to his purity of character 
and supposed virtues ; but his undisputed reputation was 
that of a talented festive immoral lawyer and politician of 
drinking habits, that sometimes carried him too far. 

In an Editorial, the Editor of The Christian Ad- 
vocate of San Francisco said: 

"It has ever been the case, that when a man sets himself 
up as a reformer, that he assumes special sancity and ex- 



94 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



cellence for himself. It is his chief reliance in his work of 
duping men. 

Mormon emissaries call themselves "Latter Day Saints.*' 
and preach that Utah is a paradise. Noyea calls his abomi- 
nation "Perfectionism.' and claims that men and women live 
in his herd of infamy, as angels live. It has always been re- 
garded as one of the first and highest duties of persons who 
would save men from these abominations, to expose the vile 
character of these corrupters of men, and to crush their sys- 
tem by the infamy of their character, and strip them of this, 
their chief power of evil. As a pretended reformer, special 
excellence has been claimed for Ingersoll. It is his chief 
stock in trade as a pretended reformer. If it is right to un- 
mask Xoyes, expose his vile character and to strip him of his 
chief power for corrupting men, it is right to treat Ingersoll 
in the same way. Why shall not men treat Ingersoll as they 
treat Noyes, if he is like him in character and work ? 

"If a man assails me, and slanders me, and I know that 
the principal power for injury in his assaults, is a reputation* 
that he is utterly unworthy to possess, it is my highest duty 
to unmask him, expose his vile character, and strip him of 
this power for evil that tie unjustly possesses, and is using to 
my injur v. Common law recognizes this, in allowing the 
character of witness to be impeached. If a fictitious reputa- 
tion that has been manufactured for Ingersoll. and that he 
is utterly unworthy to possess is his chief power in slander- 
ing Christianity, it is the first and highest duty of all lovers 
of truth, to unmask him and expose his real character and 
strip him of his power for evil that he is utterly unworthy to 
possess. If they do not do it they betray the truth. 

Ingersoll's chief weapon of assault on Christianity is 
slander and assaults on the persons of Bible history, on lead- 
ers in the history of the church, on preachers and religious 
men. not sparing the character and acts of God himself. It 
is right, and is the duty of Christians to wield truthfully 
against him, his own weapon. If infidels can applaud to the 
echo such assaults of Ingersoll, they should not complain 
when his style of warfare is retorted on himself. The au- 
thor of 'Ingersoll Unmasked' is merely using truthfully 
against Ingersoll, a weapon that Ingersoll continually use?- 
falsely in assailing religion. 

'IngersolTs character is a legitimate subject of inquiry. 
By boasting of it. and making it their chief stock in trade in 
assailing religion his admirers have made it a legitimate- 
subject of inquiry, and properly the chief subject of inquiry. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



95 



The public have a right to know whether this argument— 
1 -his spotless character"— as his admirers boast, be true. 
Again it makes all the difference in the world whether the 
puplic regard Ingersoll as a "model man," as his admirers 
claim him to be ; or know him to be what he really is, a vile 
wretch. It makes a difference in the hearing he will get. 
Decent men and women will listen to him if they accept the 
fictitious reputation, manufactured for him by his admirers. 
They will regard it as an insult to have one suggest such an 
act, if they know his real character. If persons listen to him 
as a "model man" his assaults on religion may do harm. If 
they listen to him as a vicious corrupt person they will re- 
ject them with contempt." 

Extract from preface to second edition of Inger- 
soll Urara asked. 

There has been such extravagant laudation of Ingersoll, 
and his admirers have thrown such a glamour of adulation 
around him, that the author of "Ingersoll Unmasked" is not 
surprised that his statements have met with skepticism and 
denunciation as false. But he knows whereof he affirms. 
He lived in Illinois more than twenty years. He lived four 
years near Marion, and was intimate with many who lived in 
Marion during the entire time the Ingersolls lived in Marion. 
He lived five years in the Peoria Congressional District, and 
knows intimately many who lived in Peoria the entire time 
that Ingersoll lived in Peoria. He has visited the places 
where Ingersoll lived in New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and 
Illinois. He obtained his information from first sources 
and not second-handed. Many things that he narrates are 
matters of public notoriety, so notorious that no one dreams 
of denying them. At the writer's request, W. R. Allen, of 
Cambridge, 111., visited Peoria and spent two weeks in care- 
ful investigation. 

The writer gives general indorsements of his statements : 
Elder M. F. Smith, Savory, Texas ; "I was well acquainted in 
Marion when Ingersoll lived there and know from personal 
knowledge or public notoriety, that nearly all you say of his 
career in Southern Illinois, is true." S. H. Bundy : "I have 
been a physician in Williamson County and Marion for nearly 
forty years. Your expose is thorough, as far as it goes, for 
you can only show up the outside — facts that are notorious. 
I am glad that you have exposed the Boss fraud of the cen- 
tury." Rev. J. W. Phillips, Piasa, 111. : "I have extensive 
acquaintance in Southern Illinois. I can testify that I know 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



that nearly all that you state in reference to IngersolPs career 
£here, is true." Col. J. M Clementson of McKinney, Texas: 
4< l lived in Marion when Ingersoll lived there. I know your 
statements are true. The last time I saw Ingersoll, he was 
beastly drunk." Rev. M. P. Wilkins, of Brighton, 111. : "I 
was pastor of the M. E. Church in Marion. What you say of 
Jiis career in Marion and Southern Illinois was the familiar 
talk of all who knew Ingersoll." C. J. Kimball, editor of 
.the Apostolic Church, who was born and raised in Southern 
Illinois, and extensively acquainted there, and who knows 
IngersolPs career : (i I know what the character of Ingersoll is. 
I know it to be just what you portray." Elder Ira J. Chase, 
a well known Christian gentleman, once governor of Indiana 
and pastor of the Christian Church in Peoria for six years 
says: "I hope you will get all the facts in regard 
to Ingersoll. It is a terrible record." Robert 
Schwarts, pastor of the Christian Church in Cedar 
Hapids, Iowa; "I was in Peoria on a visit. I heard 
nearly all the statements in regard to IngersolPs career in 
Peoria, and others, not in the pamphlet." IT. M. Browder 
pastor of Christian Church, Ottumwa, Ind., says; "After 
reading the pamphlet, I visited Peoria. I talked with men 
of all beliefs. I was satisfied that the statements of the 
pamphlet were true. I went home and ordered 500 copies of 
the pamphlet and circulated them.'' Chaplain McCabe, says; 
**1 have circulated thousands of copies, personally or by in- 
ducing others to get them." 

The writer might continue this list almost indefin- 
itely. I simply ask that persons everywhere, may 
read and know the real truth about Ingersoll, the 
.great apostle of American infidelity-. 



SUPPLEMENT. 



The following supplement is taken from a volume of 120 
pages, price 25 cents, entitled "Moore and Ingersoll Un- 
masked," by James W. Zachary, Editor of Quarterly Chris- 
tian* author of ' 4 Witness of The Spirits/' price $1.00 and 
numerous pamphlets. 



Atheism and other Infidelity . 



By JAMES W. Z A CHARY. 



'Weighed in the balancesland. found wanting. 



(Daniel 5: 27, ) 



'By their fruits ye shall know them." (Matt. 7 : 20. ) 




Jy fast & # 'i M p ^ £it -" 



The Angel of Justice: "Be sure 
your sin will find you out. "(Num. 



"The Old Scratch," or Son of 
Belial," iu ••Quakeracre," Fay- 
ette County, Ky. 



<<The Fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." (Ps. 14:1.) 



Atheists and other infidels may cavil about the 
works of God and deny from century to century the 
trutks of roTcAatioa, but God has arranged some truths 



INGKRSOLL UNMASKED. 



99 



so that no sane man can consistently or conscientiously 
deny them: 

1. That upon the reception of testimony the human 
mind must either believe, disbelieve, or doubt. No 
other state is possible. 

2. That belief, disbelief, and doubt are conditions 
within the purview of consciousness in the human 
mind, and, therefore, matters of absolute knowledge 
sis to their existence — that is, no man can believe, dis- 
believe, or doubt anything without knowing such is- 
the state of his mind. If you believe, disbelieve, or 
doubt the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, you 
know such is the state of your mind. 

3. When man disbelieves a thing in nature or rev- 
elation, he cannot disbelieve that he disbelieves. This 
one thing is settled beyond contradiction. Conscious- 
ness says: " I cannot disbelieve my own consciousness, 
and hence I know I disbelieve." With this settled 
basis let us follow reason to a final conclusion. 

4. Disbelief necessitates intelligence. 

5. Intelligence necessitates the intelligible. 

6. The intelligible necessitates existence — that is, 
in the absence of existence there can be no intelligible 
being, and hence no intelligence to believe, disbelieve, 
or doubt. 

7. All existence is necessary or contingent. 

8. IsTecessary existence is absolute, and contin- 
gent existence is dependent. Absolute existence is 
self-existent, infinite, and omnipotent, whether in 
one individual or more than one coexistent indi- 
vidual. 

9. The neeessary or absolute being is Jehovah, who 



100 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



created all contingent existence. 

10. The dependent is created, and proves the ex- 
istence of one or more creators. 

The uncreated could not create itself, the dependent; 
could not make the absolute; and since real existence is- 
either created or self -existent, and there, can be no de- 
sign without a designer, as, for example, the existence 
of a created watch proves that one or more beings 
caused it to exist, so certain it is that all dependent ex- 
istence came from one or more self-existent, infinite^, 
and hence absolute beings. 

The Bible, and not nature, teaches the unity of the 
Godhead. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit — three* 
beings of the same nature, power, and glory; one in 
their design and work in creation, revelation, and re- 
demption. Unity in trinity, and vice versa, is a most 
sublime and mysterious doctrine, beyond both the in- 
vention and comprehension of finite minds. Even the* 
unity of design and collation of thought by authors of 
different nationalities in widely different centuries^ 
who wrote the Bible in different languages, before the 
final compilation and arrangement in the sacred canon*, 
are sufficient to convince every reasonable person that: 
some infinite being originated the plan and controlled 
the writing. Finite man, like the immortal Milton m 
his " Paradise Lost " and " Paradise Eegained," could 
hardly write of a system so divinely majestic, even 
after the plan had been revealed from God. 

The distinguished French philosopher, M. Victor- 
Cousin, author of the " History of Modern Philoso- 
phy/ 5 wrote that " a God without a world is for man as^ 
if he were not, and a w f orld without a God is an incon>- 



INGERSOLL UN MASK KD. 



101 



jprehensible enigma to his intellect and an overwhelm- 
ing weight upon his heart." Again, this world-re- 
mowned scholar said: " Religion is the cradle of philoso- 
phy." Men and women whose minds are not crazed 
or poisoned by some system of falsehood will take de- 
light in connecting these statements with the wise man 
who wrote: " The fool hath said in his heart. There i? 
mo God." 

Deism is that phase of infidelity which rejects the 
Bible and professes to believe in God by revelation in 
feature, with all its cyclones and earthquakes. .\ gnos- 
ticism is infidelity which neither affirms nor den.es ex- 
cept to say the proof is insufficient to show 7 that any 
Clod exists. The agnostic is the ignoramus who closes 
Ms eyes and says: " Prove to me, if you can, that the 
sun is shining, or even that the sun exists." His ques- 
tions and answers are : Where did you come from \ I 
-do not know. What are you doing here? I do not 
know. Where are you going? I do not know. Then 
-what do you know? I know nothing, and, therefore, 
I believe nothing. There are none so blind as those 
who will not see, or who, 

Convinced against their will, 
Are of the same opinion still. 

.Agnosticism is the only tolerable form of infidel- 
Sty. Poor ignoramuses! They deserve pity. Souls 
shrouded in darkness so thick it can be felt! 

Atheism is an aggressive system of infidelity, the 
most heartless, the most deadly, senseless, and infa- 
mous that ever cursed any people. It is bold, defiant, 
^and despotic; it denounces agnosticism as contempti- 
ble, and spurns deism as a base perversion of facts ill 



102 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



nature. Mounted on warlike steed, with fiery hoofs,, 
it dashes across the flowery garden of Christianity r 
treading down everything fair and lovely. It runs the 
plowshare of its heartless and senseless logic through 
the minds of gray-headed mothers whose highest joy 
is love for Christ and hope of heaven. Atheism claims 
to he learned, claims to have investigated, and, there- 
fore, boldly declares: " There is no God." It enters 
Christian homes unbidden, and, with an audacity that 
would make the demons of hell blush with shame, it 
dances with fiendish hilarity around the bedside of the 
dying, or from the coffin lid delivers the funeral ora- 
tion on the doctrine of chance. It affirms: " Man is 
wholly a creature of circumstances, controlled entirely 
by them, rather than controlling them for his good. 
Man is what he is, mentally and physically, because, 
having no volition, he could not do or be otherwise. 
He came from a tadpole or a baboon. Glorious ori- 
gin ! There was no G od, and hence no responsibility 
and no sin, in the beginning; and since we live under 
the same law of chance now as then, there is no such 
thing as sin now. All men are free to indulge the 
lusts of the flesh to suit their own sweet will; hence let 
us be glad, for There is no God/ " 

Atheism is blatant, bombastic, merciless, and cruel. 
The word " atheist " means " without God," but not 
in the agnostic or deistic sense. As a system of blasted 
and blasphemous philosophy, it claims erudition, 
flaunts its red flag in the faces of decent men, and chal- 
lenges the world to mortal combat. In its logical and 
practical effects, it makes its advocates a set of dis- 



ENG EE SO LL U N M A 8 K E 1 > . 



103 



gruntled, sore-headed, pessimistic, foul-mouthed brag- 
gadocios, with no respect for God or man except as the 
strong arm of the law and the influence of polite Chris- 
tian society compel good behavior. Exceptions to this 
rule are few, as shown by the ruthless lives of most 
atheists. 

The rules of logic and honorable discussion lay the 
burden of proof on the man who affirms. It makes no 
difference what he affirms, it is the duty of the man 
who affirms to give proof sustaining his affirmation. 
If any man is big enough fool to affirm a negative, he 
must furnish the proof to sustain his negative affirma- 
tion. Atheism is aggressive; it affirms, it boldly de- 
clares, after thorough investigation: " There is no 
God." Therefore it must prove its affirmation, and 
is under the same obligation to furnish proof as is the 
Christian, who affirms: " There is a God." It is im- 
material who affirms first, since, perchance, neither sys- 
tem may contain all the truth, or, on this point, suffi- 
cient truth, as viewed by the disputants. Therefore 
the contention of the atheists to the effect they are un- 
der no logical obligation to prove the doctrine they 
affirm and which they would have the world believe 
is the silliest twaddle and nonsense. If atheism were 
the rule and Christianity the exception, then on whom 
would rest the burden of proof ? Just the same as 
now: on the man who affirms, whether negative or 
positive. 

Whoever affirms there is no sun, there is no moon, 
or there is no north pole is in honor bound to prove his 
statement. On this I remark: (1) jS'o man but a fool 
would affirm that " there is no north pole " (a thing 



104 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED, 



anseen, unheard, untasted, etc.) ; (2) none except big- 
ger fools would undertake to prove the affirmation 

after making it 

" There is no God." What means this negative af- 
firmation? What amount of knowledge is necessary 
to prove it ? What kind of man would make and be- 
lieve it? To change the burden of proof, I now affimi 
that an atheist, of a disbelieving kind, is a fool and the 
biggest fool of all when he does not know his logical 
fallacy, because to affirm logically that " there is no 
God " requires absolute and infinite knowledge. A 
man, to so affirm, should know all things within the 
universe. First, he must explore the earth inside and 
-outside: he must sound the seas and search the heavens. 
Planet after planet, with all their varied contents, laws, 
aud mysteries, must be penetrated and comprehended 
by his searching intellect, else, should he not under- 
stand all things in all planets of this vast universe, 
then, perchance, among some of the things in some 
planet where the piercing, comprehensive, fault-find- 
ing mind of the atheist has never gone there might ex- 
ist such a being as Jehovah, the God of Israel; or this 
God might be of such a nature that he dwells through- 
out immensity, and is existing very near all his crea- 
tures, though invisible and more mysterious in his ex- 
Felice than all the forces and elements in all planets 
which, perchance, derive their existence from God. 
Therefore, since the atheist cannot comprehend all 
things, he cannot truthfully say: " There is no God." 
However, the amusing part of such philosophy is that 
the atheist, in his desperate effort to disprove the exist- 
ence of a supreme, intelligent Creator, makes a god 



INGEBSOLL U X MASKED. 



106 



out of himself, because if any man can comprehend all 
things and know assuredly and affirm confidently that 
xi there is no God/ 7 then such a man is omniscient; and 
-no man but a fool would claim to be omniscient, and, 
therefore, logically, that himself is God. Hence, Da- 
vid wrote: " The fool hath said in his heart, There is 
no God." 

Contingent or created existence is manifest every- 
where, and in the beginning of all created things that 
which did not exist could not create anything; and a 
beginning of contingent existence is evident, for other- 
wise all existent beings would be absolute, and hence 
infinite, and contradict the known fact of finite ex- 
istence. The things created bear stamped upon them 
unmistakable proof of design, which necessitates an in- 
telligent designer, because blind matter and the maze 
of chance cannot indicate design; for back of the fall- 
ing type, in a foolish, atheistic illustration, based upon 
the insupposable, there must be admitted an intelli- 
gence which made the type, set it in motion, and con- 
trols that motion. Admit that a car load of type, fall- 
ing ad infinitum, but accidentally, would finally fall 
so as to print, if set as fallen, an exact copy of the Bi- 
ble. Who made the type and started it to falling 
throughout ceaseless ages? All accidents result from 
motion, all motion is caused by power, and all power 
inheres in or proceeds from real existence. If the car 
or cart load of type were all one letter — say of " c," de- 
noting " chance " — how many books would such in- 
finite falling print? What intelligence placed the 
right kind of letters, capitals and so on, in the load of 
type so as to make reproduction of a book possible? 



106 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



Has blind chance become intelligent, invented alpha- 
bets, and established a publishing company ? Where- 
fore the reasonable conclusion is that nature does not 
work without a plan, and the universe deos not exist 
without an architect — one or more beings absolute,, 
infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. 

The poet Addison well argues that there is manifest 
design in the music of the spheres: 

Forever singing as they shine: 
" The hand that made us is divine." 
The heavens declare thy glory, Lord; 

In ev'ry star thy wisdom shines; 
But when our eyes behold thy word, 

We read thy name in fairer lines. 

That the Christian religion is of divine origin is evi- 
dent from many invincible proofs. The fulfillment 
of prophecy, the miraculous attestations which accom- 
panied the preaching of the gospel of Christ, the mar- 
velous triumph of the gospel under the most direful 
persecution from infidels, the blessed influence of 
Christianity in the history of the race, and, above all, 
the immutable testimony of the inspired volume prov- 
identially preserved from the ruthless hands of infidels 
and accurately transmitted as the richest legacy known 
to man — these all show that our religion is divine, and 
that " holy men of God spake as they were moved by 
the Holy Ghost." (2 Pet. 1: 21); but, grander and 
more convincing than all these, rising in majestic 
splendor above every other consideration, the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus Christ from the dead is the one thing 
which proves his divinity, establishes the existence of 
miracles, and demonstrates the inspiration and infalli- 
bility of the Bible. If Jesus actually arose from the- 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



107 



dead, then his law is supreme, and to him the children 
of men should bow in holy adoration; but if he did not 
arise from the dead, then the Bible is full of stupen- 
dous lies and Christianity is mythological. 

The important question, then, is: Did Jesus arisf; 
from the dead? Aside from what is said in the Bible on 
this subject, let us grant, for argument's sake, as con- 
tended by the great infidel, Hume, that the twelve 
apostles concocted a malicious lie and agreed to preach 
it all over the country and deceive the people into be- 
lieving the doctrine of the resurrection. It should be 
noted that under the circumstances the apostles could 
not have been deceived. When they testified that 
they saw J esus crucified, walked with him many days 
after his resurrection, and saw him ascend into heaven, 
they well knew whether they were telling the truth or 
telling a lie. Suppose, then, they were lying; study 
their lives and trace the influence of that absurd and 
enormous lie. A man actually dead came to life again 
and ascended into heaven! Wonderful doctrine! 
They preached it all over the country, contested every 
inch of the ground in dispute, endured severest hard- 
ships, suffered most cruel infidel persecution, and final- 
ly suffered martyrdom, thus sealing w T ith their own 
blood the lie they had willfully concocted and pro- 
claimed. In mental philosophy there is a fundamental 
principle to the effect that man is actuated by motive 
power in all his voluntary deeds, from the telling of 
the most insignificant falsehoods to the performance of 
the noblest acts of life. This is an indisputable law of 
psychology, and for men's lives to contradict it would 
be as great a miracle as raising the dead or causing the 



108 



INGEKSOLL UNMASKED. 



hair of a man's head to blossom and bear bunches of 
luscious grapes. 

According to infidelity, then, the apostles lied, and 
we should not believe them. They thrust that lie into 
the faces of the very men who a few days before had 
murdered Jesus (Acts 2: 22-24; 5: 30), and made 
those murderers cry out for mercy; they stood be- 
fore kings and counselors and reasoned of temperance, 
righteousness, and judgment to come, in the name of 
the risen Christ; great cities were thrown into con- 
fusion and the world turned upside down by that aw- 
ful lie preached by the apostles and Christians of the 
first century. 

If, then, the gospel is a lie, I call upon every intelli- 
gent infidel to show the motive that prompted the apos- 
tles to originate and preach that lie, then seal it with 
the blood of martyrdom. I press the question and de- 
mand a sensible reply. Since man is actuated by mo- 
tive power in all voluntary deeds, the apostles had a 
motive in their work. Infidels should explain that 
motive consistent with their blasphemy, or else forever 
close their blatant mouths and acknowledge their im- 
becility. If it be said the apostles were lying to at- 
tain riches, fame, or any worldly emolument, I reply, 
first, that it is contradicted by the means they em- 
ployed, the kind of a lie they selected ; secondly, that 
since no such honors came to them while living, they 
would soon have stopped the agitation; thirdly, that 
since they had all to gain and nothing to lose, they 
would have recanted their lying rather than die for 
what they knew was false. Hence the only sensible 
and reasonable motive that can be given for the con- 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



109 



duct of the apostles is that they knew they were rights 
knew they were telling the truth warm and pure from 
heaven's throne, knew in whom they had put their 
trust; for they had seen him feed the multitude, calm 
the troubled waters, command the raging winds, and 
call dead Lazarus from the tomb. They had eaten 
with him after his resurrection; had heard him say, 
<k Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world; " and gazed upon him with awe profound while 
a convoy of angels escorted him to his heavenly man- 
sion. Therefore in the gathering gloom of death they 
could realize that " hope sees a star [the star of Beth- 
lehem], and listening love hears the rustle of a wing." 
Their motive had respect to things " beyond the swell- 
ing Hoods/' and martyrdom to them was far sweeter 
than denial of the Son of God, their Savior and King. 
Knowing that their leader endured the cross, despis- 
ing the shame, and was crowned with glory and honor 
in the world eternal, they, too, " looked for a city 
which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is 
God," and chose to suffer affliction with the people of 
God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. 
Infidels may quibble and rave, asseverate and deny, 
but to answer this argument based on rnental science 
is not in their power. Any course of reasoning, by 
which infidels would prove either the insincerity or 
deception of the apostles, is suicidal to infidelity, since 
no infidel could furnish better proof of anything 
within the purview of knowledge than did the apos- 
tles, and to prove his sincerity could give no higher 
evidence than his own blood in martyrdom . 

Miracles are for men. God understands his own 



110 



1NGEESOLL UNMASKED. 



works, and to him nothing is miraculous. It may be 
also that when men have laid aside the robe of dull 
mortality those things which once appeared the most 
miraculous shall be clearly understood in harmony 
with spiritual laws, showing how that life could be in- 
stantly made to rise out of death and the Savior s body 
transformed into such a condition or wrought upon by 
such a power that it would be attracted upward, and 
hence ascend into space rather than abide upon the 
earth by the law of gravitation. These things, I say, 
may, though now miraculous, be then even better un- 

• derstood than men now understand the laws of diges- 
tion, assimilation, generation, and reproduction in the 
world of mind and matter. There have been many 
definitions of miracles. The most tangible and accu- 
rate definition, excepting the merely providential in 
nature, is that a miracle is the doing of something in a 
way which is to man unusual and supernatural. The 
instantaneous conversion of water into wine, multiply- 
ing loaves and fishes contrary to the natural process, 

■■and bringing life from the state of death, as in the res- 
urrection, are miracles of the most marvelous type. 
It should be borne in mind that all wine is made out of 
water, all multitudes fed by multiplying the foods 
upon which they subsist, and animal life is propagated 
by the compilation and assimilation of insensate mat- 
ter. If Jesus had poured more than a .hundred gal- 
lons of water around grapevines, allowed it to be taken 
up through porous vines and emptied into grape cells, 
and finally squeezed from ripened grapes and made 
into sweet wine for infidels to drink, then infidels 
would #are raised no furore about this first miracle that 



INGER80LL [JNMASKEBl. 



ill 



Jesus wrought, even though the wine be fermented; 
but if the usual way of making wine had been the one 
followed by Christ, as in the miracle, and he had 
changed the plan so as to make wine in what is now the 
usual way, then all infidels would be up in arms, and 
swear by the gods that such a thing is impossible and 
the record of it is a lie. The marvel in a miracle is, 
therefore, not so much the tiling done as the unusual 
and supernatural way in which it is done. 

Xo one can follow the logical trend of known facts 
and scientific principles, be consistent, and disbelieve 
in miracles. The same is true whether a man believes 
in origin by chance or in creation and evolution by a 
supremely intelligent Creator. The plain truth is that 
all real beginnings — the origin of any contingent ex- 
istence — are just as miraculous as the resurrection of 
Christ. To illustrate the argument, take the origin of 
an oak tree. The law of nature is that oak trees grow 
from acorns. The seed of a walnut, apple, maple, or 
hickory tree or a grain of com will not produce an oak 
tree; and if an oak should grow from a grain of com, 
such would be an unusual and supernatural growth; 
hence a miracle. The origin or creation of an acorn 
without an oak tree or the creation of a white oak 
without an acorn would be, beyond doubt, a great mir- 
acle; but in the beginning, when the first acorn or oak 
tree was made, one or the other of necessity was cre- 
ated first. If the oak tree was first created, then it 
did not grow from an acorn, and hence was a miracle; 
but if by the law of chance or by the power of God 
acorns were made first and oak trees grown therefrom 
to reproduce by •etablished law, then such acorns were 



112 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



of necessity made in an unusual and supernatural way r 
hence miraculous. The same is true of the origin of" 
man and all other contingent or dependent existence.. 
Therefore all sane men should believe in miracles. 

God moves in a mysterious way 

His wonders to perform; 
He plants his footsteps on the sea, 

And rides upon the storm. 

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, 

But trust him for his grace; 
Behind a frowning providence 

He hides a smiling face. 

Blind unbelief is sure to err, 

And scan his works in vain; 
God is his own interpreter, 

And he will make it plain. 

The inspired Moses tells us that " in the beginning: 
God created the heaven and the earth/' (Gen. 1: 1.) 
The time named, " in the beginning/' was doubtless- 
millions of years ago: but the Bible does not and sci- 
ence cannot reckon the date of the beginning of finite 
existence. Both science and revelation admit such be- 
ginning, and also proclaim God's law to mind and mat- 
ter: " Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.'*" 
" Heaven " refers to space, with numerous planets, 
and " earth " means the sphere on which we live. 
Some time after " the beginning " God cleared away 
the obstacles preventing, and caused light to shine 
upon the earth, so animal and vegetable life could exist 
on this planet. The word " day " in the first chapter 
of Genesis is used to mean a " period of time." It 
may have been thousands of years; but if God so 
willed, it could have been only twenty-four hours. If 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



U3 



God's plan of creation and propagation of animal and 
vegetable life was by evolution, as taught by Christian 
scientists, then nothing said in the Bible can be shown 
to contradict it. The order in which Aloses mentions 
the " periods of time/' or days of transformation, morer 
confirms than contradicts geological truth. Animal 
and vegetable life may have existed upon this planet 
millions of years ago, but nothing either in the Bible or 
in science places the creation of man in such a remote- 
period. Mistakes (if such there be) in the calculation 
of biblical chronology do not prove the chronology is- 
false; and whether man has existed upon this earth six 
thousand years (the most probable time ) or six hundred 
thousand years (very improbable), this one thing is^ 
manifestly true: that the first man and woman created, 
either instantaneously or by the power and will of God 
operating through countless ages of evolution, was of 
necessity created in an unusual and (to us) supernat- 
ural w T ay, a way radically different from the present 
laws of generation and promulgation, as in the case of 
the creation of the first acorn or oak tree, and, there- 
fore, a miracle of the most pronounced type. From 
this conclusion there is no escape, since the first man 
and woman had no father and mother as persons have 
now, from which it follows that every sane man should 
believe that miracles have occurred, and the same pow- 
er that wrought all miracles caused the Virgin Alary to 
conceive and bear the Lord Jesus Christ, " God mani- 
fest in the flesh," and can in due time bring forth the 
sainted dead by a glorious resurrection, and give them 
an eternal home, 



114 



INGEESOLL MASKED. 



Where congregations ne'er break up 
And praises never end. 

When we've been there ten thousand years, 

Bright, shining as the sun, 
Have no less days to sing God's praise 

Than when we first begun. 

Why, then, should any one think it strange that 
such men as Lord Lyttelton, one of the greatest of 
English lawyers and jurists, and his talented friend, 
Gilbert West, upon careful investigation, should for- 
sake infidelity and become stanch defenders of Chris- 
tianity? TVTiy should we wonder that the great Xa- 
poleon could say: " I know men, and I tell you that 
Jesus Christ was not a mere man. Superficial minds 
may see a resemblance between Christ and the found- 
ers of other empires and the gods of other religions* 
That resemblance does not exist. There is between 
Christianity and whatever other religion the distance 
of infinity/ 3 

In his " Life of Jesus," page 351. the great French 
infidel. Ernest Kenan, well wrote : " Repose now in thy 
glory, noble founder. Thy work is finished, thy di- 
vinity established. ... . . A thousand times more 

beloved since thy death than during thy passage here 
below, thou shalt become the corner stone of humanity 
_so entirely that to tear thy name from the world would 
be to rend it to its foundations." Again he wrote: 

Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus 
-will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young 
-without ceasing; his gospel will call forth tears without 
^end; his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all 
:ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there b 



ano umjcu ii'ic 
d man a mon 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 115 

none born greater than Jesus." The apostate Julian, 
once a "nominal Christian, near the hour of his death 
said: " O.thou Xazarene, thou hast conquered! " In 
a sermon against" infidelity the world-renowned Cardi- 
nal Gibbons says: It is fashionable as well as profit- 
able to east odium as well as ridicule on Christianity 
and the sacred Scriptures, which are the basis of the 
Christian religion. A man of limited capacity, but 
of, fluency of speech and shafts of wit, can propose ob- 

a half hour which may take 
:o answer." Then he savs 
Christians should be ready. to give this reply: " First, 
ten thousand difficulties do not make a single doubt, 
and ten thousand "doubts do not destroy a single fact of 
revelation: ten thousand layers of fog and cloud do 
not blot out the sun in the heavens or diminish its 
•splendor. Secondly, the Christian religion Las been in 
possession for two thousand years, arid has been cher- 
ished by the wisest and best men in every age and coun- 
try, and is stronger to-day than it was ever before. 
Thirdly, all the civilizations of the past and all existing 
civilizations of to-day worthy of the name have been 
based on the doctrinal and moral principles of the Bi- 
ble. It is time enough to surrender our Christianity 
when some better system is brought forward to sup- 
plant it." 

Some one may say that the testimony of learned 
men proves nothing in this case, since all religions 
have wise men as defenders; and, not having proved 
there was a time we may rightly call " the beginning," 
therefore my argument avails nothing. To this I re- 



116 



IKGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



ply; First, in respect to the existence of Jehovah, the 
God of Israel, it is not probable that the wisest and 
best men of all ages and countries have been deceived. 
If there is no God. then why has blind nature im- 
pressed a lie— -the God idea, with consequent responsi- 
bilities — almost, if not entirely, universal, upon the 
minds of her children? Answer me. all ye avIio pro- 
fess to love nature, hate God, and scorn Christian mo- 
rality. If. then, there be the God of Israel, who hates 
and punishes sin. loves and rewards righteousness, wiry 
should it be thought incredible that he takes notice of 
his creature, man. " the offspring of God," and re- 
veals himself more clearly in Jesus of 2sazareth ? 
" the brightness of his glory, and the express image of 
Lis person i " (lieb. 1: 3.) Secondly, have I not as 
much right to assume there was, as an atheist has to as- 
sume there was not, a time we may rightly call " the 
beginning? 9 ' Does not finite existence necessitate 
the beginning? Are there not some things self-evi- 
dent and impossible to prove? The axiom that 
; ' things equal to the same thing, or equal things, are 
equal to each other " is not less self-evident than that 
" finite existence necessitates a beginning." The 
earth, with its varied contents, the drifting sand from 
every mountain peak, and the sparkling dewdrops 
upon every blade of grass, bear daily testimony of 



ING ERSO I Jj CJ NM ASKED. 



117 



evanescence and decay. Every vacant chair, empty 
cradle, and new-made grave declares there was a be- 
ginning and there is a present Xor is this all; for 
even when infidels, with stifled sobs and bitter tears, 
stand by the open tomb, 

A solemn murmur of the soul 

Tells of the world to be. 
As travelers hear the breakers roll 

Before they reach the sea. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 

By Professor Clark Braden. 




A Scathing and Fearless Expose of His Life and 
Real Character. 



FACTS IN REGARD TO THE CAREER OF R. G. INGERSOLL. 
THE GREAT MOGUL OF AMERICAN INFIDELITY. 

(Reprint from Infidelity Gone to Seed, 1889.) 

1. As a boy, lie was notorious for his disobedi- 
ence, profanity, and neglect of school and all duties. 

" 2 - A lawyer in Greenville, HI., took him into 
home and office to prepare him for the bar. Hia 
worthless, vile conduct and character were such that 



120 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



{lie lawyer soon turned him off. 

" 3. He once stopped his father in prayer in family 
worship, at the home of a stranger, and assailed what 
he w r as uttering. 

" 4. He often assailed his father on the streets with 
profane abuse for what he had said in sermon or 
prayer. . 

" 5. He has, in the most infamous manner, allowed 
the memory of his father to be vilified as a bigot and 
tyrant as an excuse for his own infamous course, when 
he knows that such charges are grossly unjust. 

" 6. In Marion, 111., he came out of a house of ill 
fame reeling drunk, and was stoned by boys as he 
Teeled across the public square. 

u 7. In Marion he undertook to clean out a grog- 
shop, and had his ear torn loose from his head by a 
tumbler hurled by the grogseller. 

" 8. There is on the county records in Marion an 
indictment against him for being one of a drunken, 
riotous mob. 

" 9. In Marion he was an idle, worthless, drunken 
loafer, gambler, and ruffian, who sponged his living 
off his overburdened father as long as his father could 
maintain a home. 

" 10. His father took him to Waverly, Tenn., told 
the people that his son was going to ruin in drunken- 
ness and vice in Illinois, and begged them to hire him 
to teach their school. On promise of good behavior, 
he was employed. His conduct soon became so infa- 
mous that he was driven out of town. 

" 11. "When he returned to Marion, 111., so infa- 



INGEHSOLL UNMASKED. 



121 



mous was his character that the hotel keeper would 
not receive him, and he had to go out into the coun- 
try to the home of a drunken boon companion. 

" 12. In Marion, Harrisburg, and Shawneetown, 
111., his life was that of a loafing, drunken, gambling 
ruffian and dead beat. 

" 13. In a drunken row, in a den of infamy in Pe- 
oria, he had his scalp cut open by a beer mug in the 
hands of a prostitute. 

" 14. He used to spend days at a time in a drunken 
debauch in rum holes and brothels, in Peoria, until his 
friends would hunt him up and take him home. 

" 15. He would often take a jug of liquor and a 
strumpet and go to a room and spend days in a drunk- 
en debauch. 

" 16. In a drunken row in a doggery, in Peoria, a 
man was murdered, and suspicion pointed to Inger- 
soll, who was one of the drunken crew. 

" 17. In a beer garden in Peoria one Sunday he 
sprinkled a baby with beer in blasphemous mockery 
of baptism. 

" 18: He once remarked that i baptism was not 
worth a G — d d — n without lots of soap.' 

" 19. In his own parlor he insulted a lady guest by 
tossing off a bumper of wine, with the blasphemous 
toast: ' Here's to Jesus Christ! ' 

" 20. When running for Congress against Judge 
Kellogg, before a joint debate in Abingdon, he was 
so drunk that he reeled out behind the building and 
spewed. 

" 21. At Maquon he was so drunk that as he reeled 
through a store he fell into a tub of butter. 



122 



INGEROLL UNMASKED. 



" 22. In the grove he was so drunk thnl he could 
not mount the rostrum, and the audience hissed him. 

" 23. He shook his fist at the crowd, in which there 
were hundreds of ladies, and bellowed out at them the 
foulest obscenity and blasphemy. 

" 24. In plain sight of the crowd he was guilty of 
as indecent an act as can be perpetrated. 

" 25. At a mass meeting in Decatur he was so 
drunk that he had to be led on to the rostrum with a 
man holding each arm. 

" 26. He was dragged through the streets of Lin- 
coln, 111., by a policeman and thrown into the cala- 
boose for drunken ruffianism. 

u 27. In Peoria he was for years a drunken loafer ? 
who was carried to his office or home or calaboose help- 
lessly drunk many a time. 

" 28. In Peoria, and wherever he is known in Illi- 
nois, he was the center of crowds of the low and vile, 
who flocked around him to roar at his profane ob- 
scenity. 

" 29. He is infamous wherever he is known in Illi- 
nois for his profane, obscene, blasphemous stories, 

" 30. It is common for him to speak of the Son of 
/jokes, and talk. 

God as 'J. Christ/ ' Mr. Christ/ < Mr. J. Christ.' 

" 31. At a supper in his house three girls of his 
family and the family of his brother drank wine un- 
til one had to be helped from the table. Ingersoll 
swore at them. 

" 32. At the table of a gentleman near Peoria, 
when their host returned thanks, the Ingersolls 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



laughed at his 6 saying something to 'his plate.' 

" 38. He insulted a blind gentleman in Youngs- 
■town, 0., with the coarsest profane ruffianism. 

,k 34. He planned an interview with Joseph Oook 
that he might insult him with ruffianism: 

'* 35. He insulted a company of ladies and gentle- 
men in Toledo, O., with the coarsest profanity. 
' • " 36. He insulted a company of ladies- and gentle- 
men in a hotel in Rochester. N. Y., w T ith coarse pro- 
fanity. 

" 37. His conversation in a railroad coach between 
Ottawa and Montreal, Canada, was full of profane, 
obscene ribaldry. 

fck 38. He insulted audiences in Urbana, 111., in Cen- 
tralia, 111., and in other places with coarse profanity. 

" 30. He insulted a lecture committee of Muncie, 
Ind., with profanity in a letter. 

"-40. He insulted a preacher, A. M. Collins, with 
obscenity in a letter. 

" 41. In 1870 he spent a night in a drunken de- 
bauch in Youngs town, O. 

'^42. But a few years ago he had a drunken de- 
bauch in Corvallis, Ore. 

" 43. He cursed and swore in a conversation with a 
reporter of the Post-Dispatch, of St. Louis, Mo. ; and 
his profanity was published in that paper. 

" 44. In a meat shop in Washington he uttered a 
coarse, blasphemous remark as a disgusting attempt 
at wit. 

? 45. In a trial in Washington, D. C, he was 
threatened with arrest and fined for blasphemous 



124 



INGEESOLL UNMASKED. 



abuse of opposing counsel. 

" 46. Previous to the summer of 1861 lie was as 
foul-mouthed and abusive a pro-slavery demagogue 
as ever disgraced Illinois. 

" 47. In 1860 he ran for Congress on the fugitive 
slave law, the Dred Scott decision, and every abomina- 
tion of the slaveocracy as his platform. 

" 48. If - as he says, preachers made a whipping post 
of the cross of Christ, he was as active making a whip- 
. ping post of every American flagstaff. 

" 49. When the first war meeting was held in Peo- 
ria, he was not invited to speak, lest he should make a 
disloyal speech. 

" 50. When he saw what was the popular side, he 
made what the politicians call a ' flop/ was rewarded 
with a colonel's commission, and has been an abusive 
assailant of what he once eulogized. 

u 51. In a cavalry reconnoissance before Corinth, 
Miss., he was chased by a boy into a barnyard, and sur- 
rendered to him. 

" 52. He resigned, in the presence of the enemy, 
without facing danger, and when men were most need- 
ed. 

" 53. He was for years a leading spirit in the Peoria 
whisky ring, the vilest ring that ever disgraced the 
United States. 

" 54. He obtained his present wealth by an unscru- 
pulous defense of one of the vilest rings that ever 
disgraced the United States, the Star Eoute thieves, 



I N G E K SOLL U N A I A 8 K E I ) . 



L25 



and became a partner with one of his pals in the 
swag. 

" 55. In a national convention of infidels he offered 
a resolution justifying the vile course of Bennett, die 
vile cancer planter, who was in jail for peddling vile 
literature. 

" 56. He signed a petition and headed an effort to 
have Haywood, the author of a vile book, in jail for 
peddling it, pardoned. 

u 57. He headed a petition and crusade to have re- 
pealed postal laws that forbade the use of mails to cir- 
culate vile literature and instruments of vice. 

" 58. He has repeatedly lied, denying that he has 
headed this crusade for free filth, and has had the lie 
crammed down his lying throat by United States rec- 
ords. 

u 59. He repeatedly embezzled clients* money, and 
had trouble over the thefts. 

" 60. While in Peoria his property was in his wife's 
name, and his paper was not negotiable at bank. 

"61. He is a charlatan that never could have ob- 
tained a certificate to teach common school. 

" 62. His harangues abound in the grossest in- 
stances of the most palpable ignorance. 

" 63. He is not a well-read lawyer, but a spread- 
eagle ranter, hired to bulldoze a jury. 

" 64. He is a coward that has, in the most cowardly 
manner, backed out of a dozen challenges to debate, 
and got out of debate with Judge Black by a cowardly 
violation of the agreement. 



126 



KGEKSOLL UNMASKED. 



" 65. By his own confession, for years he allowed a 
temperance speech to be attributed to himself, and ap- 
propriated all the eclat until his stealing was exposed. 

" 60. He stole his * Mistakes of Closes ? from £ Evi- 
dences Against Christianity,' by James Hittell, and 
plagiarized the best portions of his best harangues. 

u 67. In a sentence of nine words in his * Gods ? 
there are three as infamous lies as ever were uttered in- 
human speech. This was exposed in his presence in 
April, 1^72. He has persisted in publishing these lies 
for more than seventeen years, knowing them to be as 
infamous lies as can be uttered. 

~" 68. The character of his harangues is shown by 
the fact that in a report of one speech, called a lecture, 
k laughter, 5 k uproarious laughter, 3 etc., occur one hun- 
dred and six times. 

representations; 

;: 70. At the close of a national convention of infi- 



Ir.oersoU pocketed the collection and skipped out, leav- 
ing the dupes to foot the bill. Infidel papers, de- 
nounced him as a hog and a sneak, who robbed collec- 
tion plates. Ingersoil has never attended a convention 
since. 

" 71. He is now a wine-guzzler ? profane, and ob- 
scene, but not so shamelessly so as in early life." 

AUTHORITIES CITED. 



1. Old residents of Austinburg', Ohio; Madison, Ohio;. 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED. 



127 



and Greenville, Hi. 2. The nephew of his legal, preceptor 
in Greenville, 111. 3. Judge W. A. Lemma, Carbondale, 111. 
4, 5. All residents of Marion at that time. 6. Kobert Pul- 
ley, Marion, 111. 7. Davis, the saloon keeper; all who lived 
in Marion, 111. 8. The records of Williamson County, Mari- 
on. 9. F. M. Goodall, John Goodall, C. J. Campbell; all 
who lived in Marion. 10. Capt. R. C. White, attorney, Mc- 
Kinney, Texas. It. Col. J. M. Clementson, attorney, Mc- 
Kinney. Texas. 12. All who lived in those places at that 
time. 13. Mr. Van Buskirk, a Freethinker, of Peoria, 111. 
14. A matter of public notoriety in Peoria at that time. 15. 
Judge Louek, of Peoria, 111. 16. G. W. H. Gilbert, Peoria, 
111. 17. A matter of public notoriety. 18. Mr. Meek, at- 
torney, of Eureka, 111. 19. Mr. Wolcott, of Peoria. 20. Mr. 
Graham, Abingdon, 111. 21. L. Y. Taft, Salem, 111. 22, 23, 
84; Public notoriety. Ingersoll himself did not deny it in 
a card in the Chicago " Times " in reply to Rev. W. F. Craft's 
charge. He excused it by saying he was so drunk he didn't 
know what he was doing. 25. Dr. Halliday, Pilot Point, 
Texas. 26. William Pettit, the policeman " who arrested 
him, 27. Louck, Gilbert, and scores of— citizens of Peoria. 
29. W. L. Davidson, J. C. Wilcoxen, B. W. Johnson (editor 



of filth, to- the delight of a roaring crowd. To make a low 
joke of the name of our Lord was his special delight. It is 
a matter of public notoriety in ail parts of Illinois that 

he was distinguished in every prof -lite circle as a* leader in 
blasphemy and obscenity." 30. A matter of public noto- 
riety: the daughters of R. W. Taylor, of Youngstown. Ohio. 
31. Maj. Barry, of Chicago, and several others. 32. Mr. 
Emery, former editor of lk Transcript/' 33. Mr. Justice, at- 
torney, Youngstown, Ohio. 34. Joseph Cook. 35. Albert 
Bishop, nephew of R. M. Bishop. 36. W. L. Boyd, banker, 
McKinne^v, Texas. 37. John Potts, D.D., Toronto, Ontario. 
38. Elder H. W. Robertson, Ottawa, Kan.; Capt. Sheppard, 
Marion, 111.; hundreds of hearers. 39. Presiding Elder of 
M. E. Church; members of the committee. 40. Elder A. M, 
Collins. Cameron, Mo. 41. S. L. Clark, attornev, Youngs- 
town, Ohio; the clerk of Todd House, Februarv. 1881. 42. 
J. C. Iveezell, Philomath, Ore.; president of Philomath Col- 



128 



INGERSOLL UNMASKED 



lege. 43. " Post-Dispatch," Oct. 17, 1881. 44. Rev. Charles 
Winbigler, Columbia, Pa. 45. Daily papers of Washington, 
D. C, of that date. 46, 47, 48. Public notoriety. 49. Mr. 
Redding, revenue collector in Peoria under Lincoln. 50. 
Public notoriety. 51. Soldiers of his regiment who wit- 
nessed it; Maj. Rawson, of Confederate Army. 52. Army 
records. 53. Public notoriety. 54. Public notoriety. 55. 
Cincinnati i Commercial ' of September, 1879. 56, 57. Na- 
tional records. 58. Rev. Brown, Des Moines, la.; Joseph 
Cook; public prints. 59. The clients; a firm in Detroit, 
Mich.; legal firm in Jackson, Mich.; clients in Peoria. 60. 
Public notoriety. 61. Admitted by Maj. Gordon, of Indian- 
apolis, and other defenders. 62. His harangues. 63. Well 
known in Peoria, 111. 64. Judge Black, Rabbi Brown, Col. 
A. B. McGruder, Aaron Walker, Rev. Gregg, O. A. Burgess, 
J. H. Berry, J. W. Monser, J. C. Brooks, and scores. 65. His 
own confession in *' Christian Standard." 66. Otto Kotitch- 
ky, Cape Girardeau, Mo.; Rev. J. M. Truitt, Henderson, 
Texas; Robert Allyn, D.D., Southern Illinois Normal Uni- 
versity. 67. The lecture itself. 68. Chicago " Times " of 
October, 1876. 69. Plis harangue. 70. The 44 Secular Age " 
of October, 1885. 71. Judge Louck, of Peoria. 

The above seventy-one charges against Ingersoll by 
Prof. Braden were read before the citizens of Summer- 
side and vicinity. Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 
1889, and two days thereafter, in a public convention, 
in which one Alex. Campbell was chairman, by a stand- 
ing vote of more than one thousand people, were or- 
dered published in the Peoria (111) Transcript. Be- 
lieving it is right to " fight the devil with fire," I have 
reprinted these charges from Prof. Braden' s book 
'Tnfidflity Gone To Seed" which is no longer- in 
print, but the main facts therein are contained in this 
volume and this summary serves as a suitable closing 
chapter. 

Ingersoll in the last" years of his life was a much 
better man than he was in the years of his most active 
work against the church and the Bible, but the author 



tffGERSOtX I SM .\>K hi.. 



and publisher of I\n-uo„ , r:». 

so long as infidels scio ns & '"v"""" M 
the world and hold hfa r™ 1 'Skt? 
.vouth. just so lon,h-,; K ,;,n Unm^I^wCT 
widely read that all men I- S f RD slK>u,d r * 

IngersolJ, so far as any one k-nnw/rfi ^ 
nc-a soul shrouded in doubt blacker^nJdeTpe/thS 
any Egyptian mjjht-but when he said ■ t hi I ' 
et's grave, that "In the night of oWh I n >Al ' 
star .and listening- love hears til „ Ti \ Pe Sees 3 
better nature must hav e £ ab v ts AhT ' M j 
and virtua.lv denied t^^^^ 

jntell^nt part of mankind will be slow to beheVS 
the e 3 es ot hope" are blind to the | Iff l lt nf !; ! f 



science 



and sound philosophy, tb~ i: ear^ n fln3. 
voice of reason, and that mother na «Te br S ° ^ 
He* of the h hean has u]m -u k ; t 

children by rmpYessiue: udou th* J ... , 'V 



seen by the eye of hope, S f iffi 'V T 5 f* 
the ears of love, and bade S all S ^i^"* bv 
Father who made the - W " ? OUr Heavenly 



cmiaren Dy nnpressmg upon the soul of man the oth 
eiwise unaccounted tor belief, that there : - • 

lie wings 
all this 

x-atner wJio made the stars tn k<» . "'• " i, -" >> -'"> 
heard, the human sou. ^ve and "n SF, >° * 
beyond the swelling floods where 1 f 1°^ 

ent to its Creator, may dwklin "MaTa' . ?^ 
whi.e the endless ages roll " ^ a ' ,d 
byes." spea^ 4 _\o more goop 

Finis 



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